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Call for papers:
The Cultural Construction of Curiosity in Science
The 4S Annual Meeting San Diego October 9-12 2013
Curiosity is considered to be fundamental for science. But is curiosity just a psychological drive, manifested in individual scholars, or could it be viewed as embodied and socially enacted? This panel explores curiosity as a collective, constructed and distributed emotion. We welcome papers addressing the following questions:
How is the meaning of curiosity interpreted within scientific communities and individual researchers? Which factors are defined as central for curiosity? Classic studies in STS emphasize that social relationships coevolve with scientific practice. How then do shared notions of curiosity contribute to social coherence in scientific communities? Moreover, STS has devoted attention to how knowledge circulates, e.g. between different laboratories. How does curiosity fit into this analytical framework? Do notions of curiosity travel together with knowledge and practitioners? How has the value and joy of curiosity enrolled the public in knowledge making? The embodied character of knowledge making is by now a well-established topic. What is the embodied nature of curiosity? How can it be understood as co-constructed with gender, class and sexuality in knowledge-making practices?
By using curiosity as an example, we wish to connect STS with a burgeoning research on emotions as contextually plastic, culturally and socially constructed phenomena. STS has developed sophisticated understandings of how scientific knowledge making is a social and cultural effort. However, very little has been said about the social and cultural construction of scientific emotions, such as curiosity.
If you are interested to present a paper in this panel, please submit your abstract of 250 words on March 15 to the panel organizers:
Staffan Bergwik [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Helena Pettersson [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Please check out the conference web site http://www.4sonline.org/meeting
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