Working Groups Program: Overview
2014-2015 was another highly successful year for the Consortium’s working groups program. The Consortium hosts ten working groups on specialized topics in the history of science, medicine and technology. Each working group meets for a 90 minute session in the afternoon or evening, once per month during the academic year. Typically about nine scholars participate in each session, attending either in person or online. Each of the groups is organized and led by one to three conveners.
The working groups allow scholars from a variety of geographical locations, disciplinary backgrounds, and institutional affiliations – including faculty members, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and independent scholars across North America and (increasingly) the globe – to come together on a monthly basis to share works-in-progress and discuss important publications with like-minded peers. This year’s working group sessions included readings and discussions of Daston and Galison’s Objectivity (2007), Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907), Nicolas Rasmussen’s Gene Jockeys (2014), and Thongchai Winichakul’s Siam Mapped (1994). They also included discussion of pre-circulated works-in-progress from graduate students and faculty members, including Nathan Ensmenger, Gabriel Hecht, and Erika Milam, as well as commentaries on such works-in-progress, or on published monographs, from established scholars such as Keith Wailoo, Joanna Bourke, Michael Sappol, and Sharla Fett.
The working groups cover the following topics:
- Biological Sciences,
- Early Science,
- Earth and Environmental Sciences,
- History and Philosophy of Science,
- History and Theory,
- Human Sciences,
- Medicine and Health,
- Physical Sciences,
- Science Beyond the West, and
- Technology.
You can read more about individual working groups here.
More than 130 individuals from 57 different institutions participated in Consortium working groups between September 2014 and May 2015. The institutional affiliations of working group participants are extraordinarily broad. For example, this year’s working group participants included faculty (48% of participants) and graduate students (31%) at colleges or universities. Affiliations include Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University, UC Irvine, the University of Leeds, Nanyang Technological University, and UNAM Mexico. Many participants (15%) are affiliated not with colleges and universities, but with non-collegiate research institutes like the Smithsonian Institution, the American Institute of Physics, and the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Still others are post-doctoral fellows (3%) at colleges and universities or independent scholars (3%).
Through the Consortium’s videoconferencing system, interested scholars can now participate in the monthly working groups sessions from anywhere on the globe. In the past year, 60 scholars participated online rather than in-person, with participants beaming in from as far away as California, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Singapore, and Beijing. The videoconferencing system also allows a wider group of scholars to participate in the working groups. This year, about 40% of working group participants have primary academic affiliations more than 100 miles from the Consortium’s offices in Philadelphia.
The working groups will reconvene in September. New participants are welcome. Please contact the conveners of the groups in which you'd like to participate.