SHOT and 4S

The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) will be celebrating its fiftieth anniversary at the next annual meeting in Washington, D.C., October 17-21, 2007. The theme of the conference (and the following year's) is "Looking Back, Looking Forward":

To that end, the Program Committee seeks papers or sessions for the 2007 meeting that concern the History of Technology as it has been practiced in the past, and for the 2008 meeting as it may or ought to be practiced in the future.

See the call for papers (pdf). The deadline for proposals in March 16, 2007.

The week before SHOT meets, 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science) will be holding its annual conference in Montreal, October 11-13. The theme is "Ways of Knowing":

By this we mean several things: implicitly, that there are many ways of knowing any particular object, process, or event; that some of these ways of knowing have historically been more valued than others; and that processes of adjudicating ways of knowing have usually been neither nice nor neutral. So we are interested in processes of valuation (from the language of debates to acts of censorship) that result in one way of knowing as “the right one” or “the natural one.” We are interested in how people, groups, or cultures hold more than one way of knowing, and whether this is stable, durable, or problematic.

Details are on the 4S website. The deadline for proposals in February 1, 2007.