Events

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Symposium Depsychologizing/deneurologizing modern subjectivity?

Dear All,

At the workshop ‘Cultivating Common Ground’ the break-away group on critical theory (close textual analysis) led by Professor Karin Lesnik-Oberstein discussed how a grounding paper for the study of ‘mirror neurons’ in neuroscience could be critiqued through both scientific approaches but also through textual analysis of underpinning assumptions in the language of the theories and experiments. Interestingly, the group found, there turned out to be overlap between the science and the textual analyses in both what they critiqued in the paper and how.

Karin has continued to write critiques of neuroscience based on this close textual analysis (several are awaiting publication) and is now going to give an invited paper on how ideas of childhood and ideas of neuroscience are linked at the following symposium:

Depsychologizing/deneurologizing modern subjectivity?

One-day symposium and book launch Psychologization and the Subject of Late-Modernity (Jan De Vos, Palgrave 2014)

Ghent, Belgium, 8 January 2014

What does it mean to become the (neuro)psychologist of one’s own life? If something is not working in our education, in our marriage, in our work and in society in general we turn to the (neuro)psy-sciences. But is the latter’s paradigm precisely not relying on feeding neuro-psychological theories into the field of research and action? Isn’t therefore, psychology not always already psychologization, and is, concomitantly, neuroscience not always already neurologisation?

This one-day symposium brings together psychologists, psychoanalysts, philosophers and educationalists to reflect on the centrality of the (neuro)psy slope of modern subjectivity and its consequences for critique. The closing event of the day is the book launch of Jan De Vos’s book Psychologization and the Subject of Late Modernity (Palgrave, 2014).

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Invitation to a Public Roundtable on Science and Storytelling, 06-11-2013, 6:30 pm, University of Reading

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to invite you to a public roundtable on Science and Storytelling which we are holding to launch a new University-wide research theme on Interdisciplinary Research into the Humanities and Science (http://www.reading.ac.uk/irhs/). Climate change expert Professor Tim Wheeler and Dickens expert Dr Andrew Mangham from the University of Reading will be joined by the novelist and biographer Rebecca Stott from the University of East Anglia, the doctor and medical journalist Druin Burch, and Sally Shuttleworth, Professor of English Literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford, for an interdisciplinary discussion of how science shapes narrative and how narratives shape what people think about science.

The roundtable will be held at the University’s London Road campus (LO22, Lecture Room GO1) on Wednesday 6th November at 6.30 p.m., preceded by a wine reception at 5.30 at the Museum of English Rural Life. The event is free to all, so please do come along, and feel free to invite friends and colleagues.

Best wishes,

John

Dr John Holmes

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Dr John Holmes’s AHRC Research Fellowship on the Pre-Raphaelites and Science

Since the start of October, I’ve been working on an AHRC Research Fellowship on the Pre-Raphaelites and science. Over the project as a whole I am going to be looking at Pre-Raphaelite poetry, painting and art criticism, but I’m starting off looking at how Pre-Raphaelite artistic ideals and practices shaped the decoration and design of Victorian natural history museums. I’ve been looking at two key buildings in particular.

Dr John Holmes at museum for pre-raphaelite art and science research project

Dr John Holmes scrutinizes woodwork in museum for his pre-raphaelite art and science project

First, I spent a few weeks reading through the archives of the Oxford University Museum, and looking closely at the museum itself. When the leading Oxford scientists finally persuaded the University to build them a science faculty (as we’d now call it) in the 1850s, they held a competition for the building. They ended up making an audacious, eccentric and ultimately brilliant choice, opting for Gothic architecture as the best style for their modern science museum and laboratories. The architects they chose were the Irish firm of Deane and Woodward, who had been inspired by the ideals of John Ruskin. The scientist who gave the project its momentum, Henry Acland, was an old friend of Ruskin’s, and a friend and patron of Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Lizzie Siddal. Ruskin introduced Woodward to Rossetti, and Rossetti put him in touch with the Pre-Raphaelite sculptors Thomas Woolner, John Lucas Tupper, and Alexander Munro, who went on to carve the dynamic statues of scientists who surround the museum’s main court. Meanwhile, Woodward’s stone-masons who had come over from Ireland – the brothers James and John O’Shea, and their nephew Edward Whelan – were carving some of the most beautiful, vibrant and intricate decorative stonework done since the middle ages. Between them, Woodward, the Pre-Raphaelites, the O’Sheas and the Oxford scientists created not only a rich and continually surprising building, but one of the most original and imaginative symbolic representations of the natural world and the scientific project ever created. (I’ll be giving a talk on the Oxford University Museum as a Pre-Raphaelite museum in a couple of weeks – please click on this link for the flier if you would like to come along.

The second building where Pre-Raphaelite ideals came into play in representing science and nature was the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. Another triumph of Victorian Gothic (or more precisely Romanesque) architecture, the Natural History Museum was the brainchild of the great comparative anatomist Richard Owen and the architect Alfred Waterhouse. In the 1850s, when the Pre-Raphaelites had been arguing for an art modelled on science in its close observational accuracy and commitment to truth, Owen had become keen on Holman Hunt’s paintings in particular. While Owen went on to become friends with Hunt and his fellow Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais, Waterhouse employed Woolner and the O’Sheas to carve the sculptures and decorations for the Manchester Assize Courts and Ford Madox Brown to paint the murals for the Manchester Town Hall. When they came to design and build the Natural History Museum, Owen and Waterhouse had the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of an art grounded in science and giving a true image of nature in their minds. The result is another building that is at once fantastic in its richness and decorative exuberance, and meticulous in the accuracy with which it depicts the animals and plants that adorn its walls, windows, roofs and arches.

Both museums look to represent nature, both are masterpieces, and both were born from a combination of Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics and Natural Theology (the view of science as revealing God’s work in Nature). Even so, they offer very different aesthetic experiences and even intellectual experiences. What I am moving on to think about now is why this should be, and how, in particular, the different materials, plans, styles and techniques of the two buildings give us subtly but very significantly different interpretations of the natural world.

Dr John Holmes, Department of English Literature, University of Reading.

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Video link to ‘Chromosome Carnival’

Sasha Kagansky from the University of Edinburgh kindly sent us this example of common ground cultivation – a short video from a Summer event he was part of called Chromosome Carnival. It was a science/arts collaboration themed on chromosome separation and is a collaboration between biologists like himself and choreographers/physical theatre performers from Germany/Russia/Israel. See:

http://vimeo.com/52943913

Karin Lesnik-Oberstein

 

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Poetry and Science Event

CloudCameraPosterA3 One of the AHRC project participants, Dr John Holmes, will be holding a poetry and science event with poet Lesley Saunders next week at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. The event is entitled ‘From Microscopes to Cloud Cameras: The Poetry of Science’ and it will be taking place at 7 p.m. on Thursday October 25th. John will be talking about and reading some modern and contemporary poetry about biology, and Lesley will be reading from her new book of poems ‘Cloud Camera’. There’ll be wine too. Free admission and all welcome!