SLSA 2009 Annual Conference: Decodings Full Program With Abstracts and Online Materials Updated Nov 3, 2009 With Javascript: Click on titles to view abstracts | Contract all abstracts | Expand all | Save current view Download a printable PDF | Participant List | Conference site home Materials are available: Go to first item Session 1 - Thurs 4:30pm - 6pm Session 1 (A) Bennett SLSA Creative Writers Read I Susan Allender-Hagedorn Robert Martinez. L'Harapientu - El Farrapientu - The Raggedy Man Reading a short story that explores the encoding and decoding of memory and - especially - how our reality might be altered if we could select which memories to keep and which to eliminate. Our realities, after all, are composed of memories, sometimes accurate and sometimes not. How we read and interpret our memories is not necessarily the same as reality (just as the genetic code can be read and misread in a variety of ways). As usual, I set my stories in an Asturian context._ Susan Allender-Hagedorn; Cheryl Wood Ruggiero. Reading “Caveat Anthem” A humorous short story dealing with future longevity and genetic theft. Janine DeBaise. River birch: Touching sky Reading creative non-fiction that explores my connection to the landscape of upstate New York, including the woods behind my house, filled with brittle non-native Scotch Pines planted in the 1930s by the CCC; a meromictic lake that I've known since childhood; and my rural front yard, where I plants native river birches as a symbol of growth. My ecofeminist writing meshes scientific information, taken from geology, ecology, or botany, with personal, aesthetic, and spiritual responses to the landscape. I invite my readers to consider the genre of nature SLSA 2009 - 2 writing as a kind of decoding. Is it possible for humans to use language to decode nature? Or is metaphor a code that artists, scientists, and writers impose on nature? Session 1 (B) Crescent Science Fact/Fiction I Chair: Patrick B. Sharp Luis Arata. From Science Fiction to Science: Kepler_s Use of Modeling and Simulation in Somnium This paper gives a brief description of Kepler_s Somnium to show how this precursor work of science-fiction played out in its narrative key concepts of physics and astronomy. The Somnium constitutes a thought experiment that models and simulates relativity of motion and inertia. In a long body of notes that expand its fictional narrative, Somnium also speculates on gravitation and the influence of the moon on tides. Using Kepler_s work of fiction, the paper discusses how imagination, through the interface of models, is at the heart of science. My work on modeling examines how imagination is formalized across the disciplines to yield effective theories, simulations, designs, architectures, narratives, and works of art. I argue that such modeling further cultivates the imagination to produce constructions that blur the boundaries between the actual and the imagined. Such interaction both filters and shapes our realities. Patrick B. Sharp. The "Indispensable Woman": Early Twentieth-Century Representations of Gender, Technology, and Evolution This paper focuses on the impact of Darwin's concept of "sexual selection" on discourses of national identity in the United States of the early twentieth century. In particular, this project looks at the influence of Darwin's account of sexual dimorphism in humans, which emphasized how male and female bodies had been shaped differently through natural selection. Darwin argued that male bodies were naturally selected to invent and use technology, and therefore had larger brains and more adept hands than women. On the other hand, he argued that female bodies were naturally selected to be beautiful and nurturing in order to fulfill what he saw as their biological role as mothers. This paper explores how this evolutionary formulation of gender circulated in political discourse, popular science journals, and science fiction magazines between 1900 and 1930. Stories such as Philip Francis Nowlan's "Armageddon 2419 A. D.," the original Buck Rogers story, exemplified a pervasive anxiety about women as soldiers and masters of technology. I argue that such stories went to great lengths to make sure that their women soldiers and engineers embodied traditional feminine characteristics and were safely contained within the logics of sexual selection. In this regard, these science fiction stories were consistent with political discourse and evolutionary science as it was distributed through "popular" publishing outlets. Session 1 (C) Whitman B Stimulus/Response Elizabeth Wilson The paradigm of stimulus and response is vital to the production of scientific knowledge. It constitutes a practical framework for establishing knowledge about a variety of phenomena, particularly within the life sciences. Importantly, stimulus and response also form a theoretical-conceptual framework for interpreting specific biological phenomena, from molecular interactions to neuronal information transfer. As an organizational logic, stimulus/response relies on, and reproduces, a series of perceptual and analytic distinctions (subject/object, interiority/exteriority, action/reaction) that have significant implications for how we read biological phenomena, epistemologically and ontologically, and how the body or subject is characterized. Our panel brings together a number of different disciplinary perspectives on the ideas of stimulus and response, in order to speak generally about these concepts as a paradigm in scientific knowledge production. How does stimulus and response shape the perception of biological events? How do they reinforce or challenge traditional models of objectivity in scientific practice? And how are different conceptualizations of the body/subject constrained or enabled by this logic? Astrid Schrader. Reaction, Response, and Responsibility in Experimentation with Toxic Dinoflagellates SLSA 2009 - 3 _And say the animal responded?_ is the title of a lecture and a question Jacques Derrida puts before the entire tradition of Western philosophy, which, according to him, has always said the same: that _the animal_ cannot speak and therefore it cannot respond. Response must be distinguished from a reaction. Nobody doubts that nonhuman animals can react to environmental stimuli, instinctively or programmatically according to their _genetic program_. A genuine response, however, it is said, is proper only to the human subject; it requires reflexivity, history and memory. In this paper, I explore how such a seemingly fundamental distinction between humanity and animality guides scientific experimentations with toxic marine microorganisms and how it is displaced as soon as the scientific object is granted _historicity._ Drawing on research with toxic dinoflagellates that thrive in polluted coastal water and periodically kill a large number of fish, I discuss how a distinction between reaction and response is reinscribed differently in experiments that seek to provide evidence for their toxicity. In the case of the fish-killing dinoflagellates Pfiesteria piscicida, toxicity is not only environmentally induced but crucially depends on how the boundaries between the microorganisms and their environment are experimentally enacted, that is, how the dinoflagellates_ _agencies_ are taken into account. Experimental efforts to locate a source of bioactivity within presumed boundaries of a potentially toxic species fail to solicit a toxic response. If reaction implies the existence of a bounded object before it begins to act, the provocation of a genuine response, I argue, requires taking responsibility for specific experimental relations enacted, which cannot presuppose that a species (whether microscopic or human) is definable _as such_. Michelle Jamieson. The Ecological Origin of the Immune Response Within the discipline of immunology, the immune response is typically conceptualised as a cause and effect relation between two discrete entities: a stimulus and a response (or an antigen and an organism). As a phenomenon, it is interpreted in terms of a linear narrative of infection, in which the physical integrity of an organism is breached by the penetration of a foreign entity or substance. This perception of the immune response as an encounter between pre-existing entities, views the complementarity of stimulus and response as an effect of their meeting. However, this model does not explain how organism and antigen come to exist in a relation as different or opposed, and yet biologically correlative and implicated. That is, conventional causal interpretations of stimulus/response pairings cannot account for how a stimulus comes to be physiologically provocative for an organism that is already receptive to this specific provocation. In short, there is no sense that the unique coupling of a stimulus and a response is symptomatic of their larger, ecological entanglement. In order to complicate the view of stimulus/response relations as a confined relation between two existent things, this paper critically considers how an organism_s capacity to respond to a stimulus is triggered or animated in the first instance. Taking allergic reactions as its example, it examines the phenomenon of sensitisation: the becoming sensitive or responsive of the organism to a specific foreign substance. Focusing on Clemens von Pirquet_s theory of allergy and his extensive experiments into the events of sensitisation, I argue for a view of stimulus and response as ontologically implicated phenomena that cannot be