What is the state of the HPS / STS discipline as we enter the third decade of the 21st century?
Are we growing in size or diminishing? What are our relations with neighbouring disciplines? How well do we fare in grant capture and funding the next generations of workers in our field? How does it look at different career stages? How well embedded is HPS/STS in universities, museums, libraries and archives? What could we do to promote it? What is the health of the discipline in the UK? In Europe? Beyond? What is the history of our current state?
At the July conference in Aberystwyth, the largest regular gathering in the UK of HPS and STS people, I am keen to organise a session or two on these topics. I welcome offers of both papers and to speak on panels.
Please respond by 26th January to enable shaping of sessions by conference close of CFP at the end of the month.
Some of the potential themes (but please offer others):
- How are the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary tendencies of our disciplines creating new subjects for study? How do we relate to adjacent disciplines, including history, geography, science communication studies, art history, media and communication studies, and all the rest?
- HPS / STS are practised in many institutional settings: within university humanities and science faculties, museums, libraries, learned societies, etc. How does this work in practice? How are HPS / STS faring in the current ecology of universities and heritage organisations?
- How is HPS / STS faring, as a small discipline, within REF?
- How effective are we at providing career paths for early career researchers to graduate from undergraduate to Masters and PhD training into research projects and permanent positions? How good are we at capturing research funding to enable this?
- What do the opportunities of our discipline look like at different career stages?
- How does the UK compare with other countries?
Please e-mail me at: tim.boon@sciencemuseum.ac.uk with the subject: “BSHS Conference: State of the Discipline”
For the conference in general, please see the message below from Adam Mosley.
Many thanks.
Tim
