[Sci-tech-public] November 27th STS Colloquium & Schedule of Events

[meinbres]

A schedule of events for the period November 27 through December 1 is attached.

Please join us for the final STS colloquium of the fall term on Monday, November
27th:

What is it Like to Live in a Human-built World?
Rosalind Williams, MIT

4:00 pm, E51-095

Rosalind Williams is Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and
Technology, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and Program in Writing
and Humanistic Studies, MIT. She served as Director of MIT's STS Program from
2002-2006.  Her main professional affiliation outside of MIT is the Society for
the History of Technology (SHOT), where she has served on and chaired a number
of committees. She is serving as president of SHOT from 2005 to 2007.
Professor Williams is the author of Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late
Nineteenth-Century France; Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology,
Society, and the Imagination; and Retooling: A Historian Confronts
Technological Change, which draws upon her experiences as a historian and MIT
dean to comment upon our "technological age."  She is currently working on a
book using literary texts to examine experiences of the world in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, when global systems of transportation and
communication began to affect those experiences in significant and complicated
ways.

Professor Williams provided the following abstract for her STS colloquium:

Abstract:
What are the consequences when human beings dwell in an environment that is
predominently self-created rather than given?  This talk will describe how
technological and environmental history can combine in a synthetic history of
the built world, and how imaginative literature provides an irreplaceable
register of and source of insight into understanding this history. As an
example, the "extraordinary voyages" of Jules Verne will be discussed as
celebrations of globalization-"epics of circulation," in the words of one
critic--while also providing a critque of the tyrannies and losses
globalization entails. The talk will conclude by considering  how STS studies
can help develop a humanistic environmentalism by exploring the interplay of
change and loss in a human-built world.
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