The College of Arts and Sciences is pleased to announce the continuation of the LTU College of Arts and Sciences Seminar Series.
This lecture series invites the campus community to join us as we explore the relationships between the arts and sciences through a dedicated annual theme. Our three college departments -- Math and Computer Science; Humanities, Social Sciences, and Communication; and Natural Sciences -- invite internal and external speakers to help us discover links between each other's disciplines through seminars, lectures, and roundtable discussions.
Each event is free and open to the public. Pizza will be served at 12:15 prior to the event.
Experimental Curiosity
Through a diverse series of events hosted by our three departments, we invite the campus community to join us as we explore the relationship between experimentation and curiosity in the many senses of each term. How does experimentation fuel curiosity? How does curiosity lead to new experimental methods and approaches? How do researchers take their curiosity and transform it into tangible experiments that yield knowledge? How does experimentation and curiosity vary across disciplines? How does experimental curiosity change the way we approach our personal and professional development? Does it make us bolder in our quest to satisfy the unknown?
Upcoming Lecture
Thursday, February 6th
12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.
Location: S321
Speaker:
John MacNeill Miller, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
Allegheny College
Unsustainable Storytelling: Conservation Narratives and the Problem of Science Communication
The explosive rise of the field of science communication (often represented by the hashtag #SciComm) in recent years has provided a useful and widely popular model of what interdisciplinarity looks like. Professionals trained in science communication learn a particular way of thinking about how the arts and sciences work together: scientists gather objective knowledge from their data, and humanistic storytellers work to communicate that highly technical information in appealingly subjective ways to a broader popular audience.
This talk will question such models of interdisciplinarity, challenging the underlying principles of science communication as a field. The talk traces the particular vision of interdisciplinarity popular among science communicators back to the nineteenth century, drawing on cultural history to show how literature and science came to be understood as oppositional forms of writing about human experiences of the natural world.
Highlighting current examples of science communication from children’s literature, social media, and environmental education shows how these practices actually reinforce disciplinary divides by segregating skill sets and forms of knowledge according to questionable ideas of what the arts and sciences "really" are. As this version of interdisciplinarity divides up our ways of knowing and privileges some above others, science communication ignores a more fundamental truth: the reality that scientific knowledge is conceived and shared through language. A more fundamental reckoning with how language operates has the power to radically alter our sense of where storytelling enters the sciences—and why both science and storytelling matter deeply.