Environment, Health, and Place in Global Perspective: Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, April 2002

提案摘要greg mitman全球视角下的环境、健康和地方：会议提案这个项目是一个为期两天的研讨会式会议，致力于“全球视角下的环境、健康和地方”，于2002年4月在威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校举行。会议旨在汇集来自环境史、科学史、医学史、科学社会研究和医学地理学等领域的跨学科学者，从全球视角探讨环境与健康之间的关系。本次会议的核心理论问题之一是探讨如何考虑物质性，环境，和地方可以促进科学史中的新的史学观点，使我们超越由社会建构主义及其批评者产生的争论。本次会议的另一个目的是讨论将本地历史与全球历史和比较历史叙述联系起来的问题和框架。在整个20世纪90年代，许多对科学史的创造性贡献，就像其他科学研究一样，都围绕着科学工作的社会文化维度。这些探索，无论是对科学家的语言、实践还是社会关系的探索，都被批评为忽视了科学的物质参与和干预，以及科学家自己对他们所做的事情往往更自然的描述。在过去的几年里，在科学史本身以及环境和医学史等邻近领域，学者们对这些争论的意识形态极性越来越不耐烦。这些学者在很大程度上同意建构主义者关于社会和文化对自然知识的重要性的观点，他们寻求新的方法来调和这些见解与对科学的物质维度的更大的欣赏。在科学史上，这一趋势使人们越来越认识到地理和地点在科学工作中的重要性，以及在这一领域和其他领域中，地点或环境的历史既涉及到人体，也涉及到人体。这次会议将把这些领域的个人聚集在一起，讨论和绘制他们一直在趋同的这个新方法论领域的框架。组织者还希望引导与会者进行国际比较并提出问题。会议的主题集中在环境、地方和健康的历史上，与会者包括那些工作范围跨越两个世纪，横跨美国、欧洲和第三世界的学者。这些案例研究重新审视了旧的世界范围的叙事，如殖民主义和现代化，经常在科学史及其学科邻居中被引用。组织者还希望讨论一些较新的话题，比如全球化，这些话题已经引起了学术界的兴趣，但对科学史和其他领域的影响却很少被探索。

Proposal AbstractGreg MitmanEnvironment, Health and Place in Global Perspective: Conference ProposalThis project is a two-day workshop-style conference devoted to "Environment, Health, and Place in Global Perspective," in April 2002 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The conference aims to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars drawing from the fields of environmental history, history of science, history of medicine, the social studies of science, and medical geography to explore the relationships between environment and health from a global perspective. One of the central theoretical questions of this conference is to explore how considerations of materiality, environment, and place can contribute to new historiographic perspectives within the history of science that move us beyond debates generated by social constructivism and its critics. A companion purpose of this conference is to discuss questions and frameworks that link the local to more global and comparative historical narratives.Through the 1990's, many creative contributions to the history of science, as elsewhere in science studies, have revolved around the sociocultural dimensions of scientific work. These explorations, whether of scientists' language, practices, or social relations have been attacked for neglecting the material engagements and interventions of science, as well as scientists' own, often more naturalistic accounts of what they do. Over the last few years, within the history of science itself as well as within neighboring fields such as environmental and medical history, scholars have grown impatient with the ideological polarity of these debates. Largely granting the constructivists' points about the importance of society and culture to natural knowledge, these scholars have sought new ways of reconciling these insights with a greater appreciation of the material dimensions of science. Within the history of science, this trend has led to a growing appreciation of the importance of geography and place in scientific work and in this and other fields, of the ways in which histories of place or environment both involve and invoke the human body. This conference will bring together individuals from each of these fields to discuss and chart frameworks for this new methodological terrain toward which they have been converging. Organizers also hope to steer conferees toward international comparisons and questions. Topically centered upon the history of environment, place and health, conference participants include scholars whose work ranges through two centuries and across America and Europe as well as the Third World. The case studies reexamine older world-scale narratives, such as colonialism and modernization, often invoked in the history of science and its disciplinary neighbors. Organizers also anticipate discussion about newer ones like globalization, which have sparked scholarly interests but whose implications for the history of science and these other fields have been less explored.