Challenging Models

This conference at Cambridge looks interesting, although the deadline for abstracts is coming up rather quickly (30th June):

Challenging Models in the Face of Uncertainty

Tuesday, 28 September 2010 to Thursday, 30 September 2010

Location: Gillespie Conference Centre, Clare College, Queens Road, Cambridge

What do financial crises, pandemic flu and climate change have in common? All involve policy decisions that rely to some extent on formal models to predict the future – and all their models have been criticised for not fully taking deeper uncertainties and public values into account. The conference will focus on the relationship between formal analysis and policy making across a range of domains, including health, environment, finance and technology, bringing different disciplinary perspectives to bear on a set of shared problems and linked themes.

There are four themes:

How Matter Matters

Call for papers: “How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts and Materiality in Organization Studies” – Third international symposium on process organization studies.  16-18 June, 2011, Corfu, Greece.  Keynotes: Karen Barad, Wanda Orlikowski, Lucy Suchman. Download the full description here:  CFP PROS 2011 (PDF).

A Billion Gadget Minds

An interesting workshop coming up at the Swedenborg Society:

A Billion Gadget Minds: Thinking Widgets, Data and Workflow

A One Day Workshop at the Swedenborg Society, London, Thursday 21st October from 10 until 6pm.

A growing body of research, including literature on cognitive anthropology, software studies and cognitive capital suggests that whatever is called ‘thinking’ occurs amidst mechanisms, habits, codelike systems, devices and other formally structured means. If intelligence, far from being a property of ‘the human’, is an informal and provisional function of the ensemble of mechanisms and relations that comprise a social field, then we need to explore the co-relation of cultural and experiential practices, thought and intelligent devices.

In this day-long workshop, we would like to evaluate the ways in which contemporary hardware and software augment and distribute intelligence, as well as the ensemble of social relations which form around thinking practices as they synchronise, mesh, de-couple, breakdown and collapse with variable effects. To this end we are seeking contributions that propose analyses or working experiments with thinking work as imbricated in cultural, material, corporeal, technical, economic and psychic practices. These might include design, creative, analytic, management, personal, administrative, scientific or technical thinking.

We are particularly keen to solicit contributions from researchers, practitioners and writers who want to develop a transdisciplinary engagement with novel philosophical, aesthetic and political problematisations of ecologies of extended cognition / ubiquitous computing / social intelligence.

Please send proposals (no more than 400 words) to Andrew Goffey, Matthew Fuller or Adrian Mackenzie at a.goffey@mdx.ac.uk , m.fuller@gold.ac.uk or a.mackenzie@lancaster.ac.uk by July 31st at the latest.

Musical philosophy chairs

A variation on the popular game, as played by British universities. When one university (e.g. Middlesex) turns a deaf ear to philosophy, removes the chairs and is not able to face the music, another university (e.g. Kingston) steps in and offers as many chairs as possible to the abandoned band of philosophers. The show must go on…

CRMEP set to move from Middlesex to Kingston University

Yesterday brought the happy news that the world renowned Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy has found a new home at Kingston University. As many of you know, this development follows weeks of unrest at Middlesex University following its decision to close down all its Philosophy programmes and to close its stellar Philosophy department.

We are extremely pleased to learn that the CRMEP will be preserved in this way and we wish Professor Eric Alliez, Professor Peter Hallward, Professor Peter Osborne and Dr Stella Sandford of the CRMEP a long and prosperous future at Kingston.

Congratulations to both the philosophers and Kingston University for a game well played. Middlesex University surely won’t be a sore looser, since they did not seem to understand what they had in the first place. To quote Warren Buffett, “Anyone not aware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.”