Upcoming conferences

In an effort to clear out conference announcements relevant to The Push Button Brain, I'm going to consolidate a number of them into one post. Some may or may not be immediately relevant to Canadian historians of technology and science, but should be interesting nonetheless. In no particular order:

• This is short notice, but why not head for Scientific research in World War II, 25-26 January 2007 in Museum Boerhaave, Leiden. This two-day conference will seek to explore how scientists managed to cope with the particular circumstances created by the war. We invite historians working on World War II, science, and scientific instruments to give their views and to elaborate on the theme. The deadline for papers has passed, but nonetheless it should be interesting. UPDATE (November 29): The preliminary program is now online.



• ICOTECH 2007 Copenhagen, Denmark, 14-18 August 2007. Deadline for proposals is 15 January 2007. Fashioning Technology: Design from Imagination to Practice is the symposium’s general theme. While open to all proposals dealing with the history of technology, the program committee suggests the following subthemes for the consideration of session organizers and contributors:
  
  • Consequences of design, purposeful and accidental
  • National styles in design and technology: myth or fact?
  • Embodying design in products
  • Social and/or cultural values in the design of products, machines andsystems
  • Designers: craftsmen, engineers, artists, or something else?
  • Fe/male designs: sex and gender in design
  • Tweaking technology and products: users as designers
  • Imaginary designs: unrealized, utopian and immaterial constructions
  • Design history in the context of the history of technology
  • Designing consumption from commodities to malls
  • Reshaping spaces: landscapes, cityscapes and technoscapes
  • The fashioned body: technologies of food, clothing and medicine
  • Building technoscience: design in the laboratory
  
  See the full Call for Abstracts for more information.



• The BSHS will be holding its 2007 conference at the University of Manchester, UK, Thursday 28 June - Sunday 1 July 2007. Papers are invited in all areas of the history of science, technology and medicine. Proposals for themed panels are particularly encouraged. See the call for papers for additional details. I do know there is interest in a session devoted to the history of computing, which would be rather appropriate given that the UK's National Archive for the History of Computing is as part of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Manchester.