Seminars take place on Thursdays from 3.30pm to 5pm in the Hopkinson Lecture Theatre, unless otherwise stated.
Organised by Rosanna Dent.
Easter Term 2025
1 May
Lee McIntyre (Boston University)
Disinformation, denial, and the assault on truth
Disinformation is the scourge of the information age, causing both science denial (climate denial, anti-vaxx, etc.) as well as the more recent 'reality' denial (Trump's claim that the 2020 election was stolen, Q-Anon conspiracies, etc.). People do not wake up one day wondering whether there are tracking microchips in the Covid vaccines or a Jewish space laser causing the California wildfires. They are led to those ridiculous, false beliefs through strategic lies, told by those who created them, in service of their own economic, ideological, or political interests. The problem, however, is that once disinformation is in the information stream, it does not just tempt someone to believe a falsehood, but also polarizes them around a factual issue, which undermines trust and poisons the path by which they might revise past beliefs and embrace future true ones.
How to address this? Engaging with deniers is one path. In a recent study in Nature Human Behavior Cornelia Betsch and Phillip Schmid provide the first empirical evidence that science deniers can sometimes be led to give up their false beliefs. Most intriguing, one of the methods for doing this has nothing to do with the content of the belief itself, but focuses instead on the path of reasoning that led them to it. 'Technique rebuttal' thus provides a ray of hope for philosophers and other non-scientists to address science (and reality) denial, even if they are not content experts on the topic of denial. But there is a hitch. This method doesn't always work... and it is slow.
What might work better? In my talk I will explore a few ideas from my most recent book On Disinformation (MIT Press, 2023), in which I claim that the pinch point on the disinformation highway from creation to amplification to belief is to clamp down on the spread of disinformation.
8 May
Robin McKenna (University of Liverpool)
Doing your own patient activist research
The slogan 'Do Your Own Research' (DYOR) is often invoked by people who are distrustful, even downright sceptical, of recognized expert authorities. While this slogan may serve various rhetorical purposes, it also expresses an ethic of inquiry that valorises independent thinking and rejects uncritical deference to recognized experts. This paper is a qualified defence of this ethic of inquiry in one of the central contexts in which it might seem attractive. I use several case studies of patient activist groups to argue that these groups often engage in valuable independent research that advances biomedical knowledge. In doing so they demonstrate the value of 'lay expertise' and the epistemic as well as political necessity of not simply deferring to recognized experts. I also give some reasons why patient activist groups often produce valuable biomedical knowledge: they are examples of what I call 'research collectives'. Research collectives are research communities that differ from the traditional research communities we find in universities and research institutes in that their members typically lack formal relevant scientific credentials and training. But they are similar in that they have internal structures – training procedures, norms of discussion, venues for holding discussions – that facilitate the production of knowledge. I finish by suggesting that future research into the differences and similarities between research collectives and traditional research communities is required.
15 May
Felipe Romero (University of Groningen)
The emergence of metascience: risks and opportunities
The replication crisis in the 2010s shook the scientific community, causing widespread concern and scepticism. In response, a new wave of optimistic researchers has turned the scientific lens inward, aiming to improve science itself. These metascientists have made progress in diagnosing the crisis, pinpointing questionable research practices and bad statistics as key culprits, and proposing reforms to statistical methods and publication practices. While the term 'metascience' is not new, its institutionalization as a discipline is a recent development. A growing community of practitioners, societies, conferences, and research centres now shape this expanding field. This growth raises compelling philosophical questions: Where did metascience come from? How does metascience relate to established fields like philosophy of science and science studies? Is metascience merely about data collection, or does it offer deeper epistemic insights? This talk explores these questions by proposing a taxonomy of metascientific projects, examining models of how scientific disciplines form, and evaluating whether metascience holds a unique epistemic status.
22 May
Joint seminar with the World History Seminar; start time 4pm
Sadiah Qureshi (University of Manchester)
Pinosaur redux: whose lives count in histories of extinction?
In 1994, David Noble, a Field Officer for the Wollemi National Park, in New South Wales, came across a tree he did not recognize in a narrow canyon. Quickly dubbed the Wollemi pine, the tree proved to be an unknown species whose evolution stretched back to the lost worlds of the dinosaurs, before the formation of modern continents, and even flowering plants. Promoted as the Pinosaur and the botanical find of the century, the tree's ensuing journey from wild endangerment to domesticated treasure is a rare tale of an endangered plant celebrity attracting global conservation efforts. This talk traces the story of the Wollemi pine from its origins and chance find, to the present day, to consider why it is so important for us to include plants within histories of extinction, especially when they are routinely neglected as species needing conservation or subjects worthy of historical narratives. In particular, the talk will explore how paying attention to plants challenges historians to radically rethink common divisions of time, place, and whose lives are historically interesting or significant, and helps us move beyond both anthropocentric and animal-centric policy-making and history writing.
29 May
Eram Alam (Harvard University)
Mobilizing medicine
For more than 60 years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciting immigrant physicians trained at the expense of other countries. In this talk, I will examine the first large scale migration initiated during the Cold War with the passage of the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This bill expedited the entry of Foreign Medical Graduates (FMGs) from postcolonial Asian nations and directed them to provide care in shortage areas throughout the country in exchange for legal status. Although this arrangement was conceived as a temporary measure, it has become a permanent feature of the US medical system with foreign physicians comprising a quarter of the total physician labor force. This neocolonial dynamic has entrenched a stratified healthcare system; foreign physicians are directed to America's marginalized communities, thereby disincentivizing organized medicine from addressing the structural conditions that perpetually produce labor shortages. The ubiquitous and integral presence of foreign physicians not only reveals the racialized operations of US medicine, but it also makes visible how the political economy of care writ large operates in our globalized present.
5 June: Twenty-Ninth Annual Hans Rausing Lecture
Venue: Biffen Lecture Theatre, Department of Genetics, Downing Site
Asif A. Siddiqi (Fordham University)
But why here? Space technologies, the logic of location, and the violence of infrastructure
This talk is part of a larger project that imagines a history of space exploration centering the Global South as a crucial site for humanity's first steps off the planet. During the Cold War, when the United States, the Soviet Union, and many Western European nations first began to explore space, they stationed considerable ground infrastructure on Africa, Asia, and Latin America to track, communicate with, and launch satellites into orbit. Largely invisible in popular accounts of space exploration, these technoscientific stations, strewn across many postcolonial locales, produced a wide range of entanglements with local populations and environments, usually in the form of displacements of people or damage to local ecologies. In looking at the history of this 'passive' infrastructure in several locales, including Algeria, Kenya, and India – the talk offers insights along three threads. First it explores the ways in which the selection criteria for locating such technoscientific infrastructure derived from a certain kind of 'logic of location' which naturalized exclusionary practices as being 'rational' and opposition to them as being antimodern, ahistorical, and against the greater good. Second, it restores 'history' to these sites by situating them outside of the space program, thus linking them to broader political economies and colonial geographies, rendering visible the seams and sutures of a larger story of the (re)appropriation of postcolonial geographies in the late 20th century for space exploration. Finally, the talk offers a methodological intervention, situating this kind of technoscientific 'passive' infrastructure (and often, their abandoned ruins) as part of a global (and postcolonial) history of technology, one legible at multiple and overlapping registers, including the social, the technological, and the environmental.