Cluster Blog

On a sunny weekend last April, about 40 participants from a wide diversity of backgrounds gathered together for the Politics of Care in Technoscience Workshop at York University.

Reflections on 2b Theatre’s “The Story of Mr. Wright” and post-performance discussion with Dr.

Richard Spiegel is a Cluster MA student at McGill University.Read Cindy Stelmackowich's blog on the event HERE

The week of August 13-17 I attended the Reading Artifacts Summer Institute 2012 (RASI) at the Canada Science and Technical Museum (CSTM) in Ottawa. Many of the participants were museum professionals and scientists who came to gain knowledge and experience about working with, recording, and displaying objects; others, like me, were concerned with obtaining a deeper understanding of how to work with artifacts as primary documents.

I recently had the pleasure of attending the Politics of Care in Technoscience, a workshop at York University that explored the concept of “care” in feminist STS. The opportunity to spend several uninterrupted days discussing papers with colleagues is a rare treat, and it made me nostalgic for my first years in grad school where my “job” mainly consisted of absorbing new ideas and discussing them with my peers.

Live Tweets:

The future. An enduring cultural fascination yet an inherently elusive entity. As Jeaneatte Winterson writes, "The future lies ahead like a glittering city, but like the cities of the desert disappears when approached."

The following is a sample of Tweets resulting from Live Blogging of the University of Ottawa's Frontiers in Research : Our Post-Human Future event Nov 15th, 2011. See @situsci for the latest. 

Gilles Bibeau (2011) reminds us to step down from the altar of genomythology: the dominance of The Gene, fearless flight into a technocratic future, biologist Supermen that save the world.

When a cartoon is in the early stages of production artists craft the storyline by creating a series of still images. Those images, referred to as “extremes”, depict characters in their most exaggerated positions and are often used in the final stories as visual hooks and punchlines for the audience: anvils are falling on heads; bodies are magically suspended miles above ground; tears are streaming from eyes. Chuck Jones, who famously created the Road Runner and Wile E.

Here's a liveblog of the colloquium "Synthetic Biology at the Interface of Science and Policy" at the University of Ottawa.

By Charles Bourne University of King's College, Halifax. The second of a few entries about my experience at the Reading Artifacts Summer Institute this summer, a week-long event at the Canada Science and Technology museum focused on exploring material culture and its related fields. August 15-19, Ottawa.

This June, Alfred Moore and Mark Warren of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia convened a workshop on “Scientific Authority in Democratic Societies.” The central problem confronting the participants was, as the workshop outline said, the “ways in which science, technology and expertise have become politically problematic.” From controversies in the Food & Drug Administration in the United States to contestation over climate change in the international arena, the politicization o