Perspectives on the Popularisation of Natural Sciences in a Diachronic Overview
Perspectives on the Popularisation of Natural Sciences in a Diachronic Overview

Author: Eleonora Chiavetta

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-05-02

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 1443860034

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This volume combines strands of research currently being debated in linguistic scholarship, such as the issue of specialized discourse, the issue of knowledge dissemination, and the issue of the versatility of genres. It presents some of the relevant findings of an Italian National Research Project focusing on specialized discourse, which involved researchers and scholars from several Italian universities. Discursive popularisation is here analysed with regard to the domain of natural sciences, particularly focusing on botany and gardening. Another relevant feature of the book is the diachronic approach used in discussing the issue of popularisation. The authors of the volume focus on their research following their own methodological choices, and, as such, investigate critical discourse analysis, genre analysis, and corpus analysis. All the authors, however, apply a diachronic perspective to their study. Chapters, therefore, span from the dissemination of science in the 17th century English scientific community, through the Late Modern English Period, to the end of the 19th century, throughout the 20th century, up to the present day. Within the common frame of natural sciences, each author develops a specific topic such as Irish botanical terminology; the development of garden notebooks; the manipulation of Darwin’s theory of evolution; the role played by the Puritans in promoting a plain and clear English scientific prose; Darwinism in the 20th and 21st century British press; and scientific popularisation in Nobel lectures.

Interdisciplinarity
Interdisciplinarity

Author: Andrew Barry

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-06-26

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1136658459

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The idea that research should become more interdisciplinary has become commonplace. According to influential commentators, the unprecedented complexity of problems such as climate change or the social implications of biomedicine demand interdisciplinary efforts integrating both the social and natural sciences. In this context, the question of whether a given knowledge practice is too disciplinary, or interdisciplinary, or not disciplinary enough has become an issue for governments, research policy makers and funding agencies. Interdisciplinarity, in short, has emerged as a key political preoccupation; yet the term tends to obscure as much as illuminate the diverse practices gathered under its rubric. This volume offers a new approach to theorising interdisciplinarity, showing how the boundaries between the social and natural sciences are being reconfigured. It examines the current preoccupation with interdisciplinarity, notably the ascendance of a particular discourse in which it is associated with a transformation in the relations between science, technology and society. Contributors address attempts to promote collaboration between, on the one hand, the natural sciences and engineering and, on the other, the social sciences, arts and humanities. From ethnography in the IT industry to science and technology studies, environmental science to medical humanities, cybernetics to art-science, the collection interrogates how interdisciplinarity has come to be seen as a solution not only to enhancing relations between science and society, but the pursuit of accountability and the need to foster innovation. Interdisciplinarity is essential reading for scholars, students and policy makers across the social sciences, arts and humanities, including anthropology, geography, sociology, science and technology studies and cultural studies, as well as all those engaged in interdisciplinary research. It will have particular relevance for those concerned with the knowledge economy, science policy, environmental politics, applied anthropology, ELSI research, medical humanities, and art-science.

Genealogy of Popular Science
Genealogy of Popular Science

Author: Jesús Muñoz Morcillo

Publisher: transcript Verlag

Published: 2020-11-30

Total Pages: 587

ISBN-13: 3839448352

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Despite the efforts of modern scholars to explain the origins of science communication as a social, rhetorical, and aesthetic phenomenon, most researchers approach the popularization of science from the perspective of present issues, thus ignoring its historical roots in classical culture along with its continuities, disruptions, and transformations. This volume fills this research gap with a genealogically reflected introduction into the popularization of science as a recurrent cultural technique. The category »popular science« is elucidated in interdisciplinary and diachronic dialogue, discussing case studies from all historical periods. Classicists, archaeologists, medievalists, art historians, sociologists, and historians of science provide the first diachronic and multi-layered approach to the rhetoric techniques, aesthetics, and societal conditions that have shaped the dissemination and reception of scientific knowledge.

Variations in Specialized Genres
Variations in Specialized Genres

Author: Vijay K. Bhatia

Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag

Published: 2015-09-16

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 3823378333

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The book is an edited volume of carefully selected articles by eminent scholars focusing on the specialist knowledge transmission through genre variation, particularly on the issues of standardization and hybridity. The main focus was to analyse discursive popularization in the contexts and domains of natural sciences, law, and commerce, viewed in a diachronic perspective. The scholars involved have concentrated their studies on the creative transformation, hybridization, and even bending of genres used to popularise scientific, legal and commercial discourse for different communicative purposes and audiences, thus extending the conventional genre boundaries to disseminate specialized knowledge. The proliferation of specialized knowledge has indeed created a growing need to convey expert knowledge to a variety of addressees, with different levels of shared understanding and expertise. Such disciplinary knowledge can only be conveyed through various subtle manipulations of generic conventions keeping in mind the aims, the users, the media, the social contexts, and the domain with which specific knowledge is associated.

'The Conditioned and the Unconditioned'
'The Conditioned and the Unconditioned'

Author: Isabel Moskowich

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9027262179

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This volume includes methodological considerations and descriptions of some of the texts compiled in The Corpus of English Philosophy Texts (CEPhiT), together with a number of pilot studies that demonstrate how the corpus can be used to investigate English philosophy writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. CEPhiT is part of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (CC). The sampling method employed requires the collection of extracts of ca. 10,000 words. This method has been followed in CETA and CEPhiT, with samples from 40 different authors in the latter, both from Europe and North America. Text selection is based on some extralinguistic criteria, such as year of publication, sex, geographical provenance and text-types/genres. The corpus contains samples belonging to six different genre categories. This taxonomy, as well as some other extralinguistic information, can be used to search the corpus. CEPhiT, together with the Coruña Corpus Tool purpose-designed software by IrLab, was originally made available with the volume on CD-rom. As of late 2018, these are also accessible online at the Repositorio Universidade Coruña: CCT at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21850 and CEPhiT at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21847

History Within
History Within

Author: Marianne Sommer

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-05-27

Total Pages: 553

ISBN-13: 022634732X

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History Within explores how the life sciences have contributed to public and popular history and to moral and political visions for a just society of the future. It shows how the sciences that deal with the evolutionary history of human groups and of humankind are powerful producers of origin narratives and experiences of kinship and belonging. Marianne Sommer looks at the collecting efforts of three key scientistsHenry Fairfield Osborn, Julian Huxley, and Luca-Luigi Cavalli-Sforzathat render the interactive creation of bio-historical knowledge possible in the first place and asks how their scientific data was translated into more broadly meaningful narratives, images, and exhibits. The bones, organisms, and molecules they studied acquire political value, she argues, in negotiations over issues of interpretation and how scientific results ought to be communicated to the public. History Within is an essential history of biology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries."

The Scientific Revolution
The Scientific Revolution

Author: Steven Shapin

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-11-05

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 022639848X

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This scholarly and accessible study presents “a provocative new reading” of the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century advances in scientific inquiry (Kirkus Reviews). In The Scientific Revolution, historian Steven Shapin challenges the very idea that any such a “revolution” ever took place. Rejecting the narrative that a new and unifying paradigm suddenly took hold, he demonstrates how the conduct of science emerged from a wide array of early modern philosophical agendas, political commitments, and religious beliefs. In this analysis, early modern science is shown not as a set of disembodied ideas, but as historically situated ways of knowing and doing. Shapin shows that every principle identified as the modernizing essence of science—whether it’s experimentalism, mathematical methodology, or a mechanical conception of nature—was in fact contested by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century practitioners with equal claims to modernity. Shapin argues that this contested legacy is nevertheless rightly understood as the origin of modern science, its problems as well as its acknowledged achievements. This updated edition includes a new bibliographic essay featuring the latest scholarship. “An excellent book.” —Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review

Beyond the Romans
Beyond the Romans

Author: Irene Selsvold

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2020-04-09

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 1789251370

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This latest volume in the TRAC Themes in Theoretical Roman Archaeology series takes up posthuman theoretical perspectives to interpret Roman material culture. These perspectives provide novel and compelling ways of grappling with theoretical problems in Roman archaeology producing new knowledge and questions about the complex relationships and interactions between humans and non-humans in Roman culture and society. Posthumanism constitutes a multitude of theoretical positions characterised by common critiques of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. In part, they react to the dominance of the linguistic turn in humanistic sciences. These positions do not exclude “the human”, but instead stress the mutual relationship between matter and discourse. Moreover, they consider the agency of “non-humans”, e.g., animals, material culture, landscapes, climate, and ideas, their entanglement with humans, and the situated nature of research. Posthumanism has had substantial impacts in several fields (including critical studies, archaeology, feminist studies, even politics) but have not yet emerged in any fulsome way in Classical Studies and Classical Archaeology. This is the first volume on these themes in Roman Archaeology, aimed at providing valuable perspectives into Roman myth, art and material culture, displacing and complicating notions of human exceptionalism and individualist subjectivity. Contributions consider non-human agencies, particularly animal, material, environmental, and divine agencies, critiques of binary oppositions and gender roles, and the Anthropocene. Ultimately, the papers stress that humans and non-humans are entangled and imbricated in larger systems: we are all post-human.