The International Conference on Technology, Knowledge and Society will feature plenary sessions by some of the world’s leading thinkers and innovators in the field, as well as numerous parallel presentations, by researchers and practitioners.
Bill Cope
Christine Hine
Karim Gherab Martín
Alfred Nordmann
Garden Conversations
Plenary Speakers will make formal 30-minute presentations. They will also participate in 60-minute Garden Conversations - unstructured sessions that allow delegates a chance to meet the speakers and talk with them informally about the issues arising from their presentation.
Please return to this page for regular updates.
The Speakers
- Bill Cope
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Bill Cope is a Research Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA and Director of Common Ground Publishing. His current research interests include theories and practices of pedagogy, cultural and linguistic diversity, and new technologies of representation and communication.
- Christine Hine
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Christine Hine is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey. Her main research centres on the sociology of science and technology, including ethnographic studies of scientific culture, information technology and the Internet. She has taken a lead role in promoting discussion of methodologies for sociological understanding of the Internet. In particular she has deployed mobile and connective approaches to ethnography which combine online and offline social contexts. She is author of Virtual Ethnography (Sage, 2000) and Systematics as Cyberscience (MIT, 2008) and editor of Virtual Methods (Berg, 2005) and New Infrastructures for Knowledge Production (Information Science Publishing, 2006). Christine was President of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology from 2004 to 2008.
- Karim Gherab Martín
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Dr. Karim Gherab Martín is a physicist and philosopher of science and technology. For the 2008 and 2009 academic years, he was in Cambridge, USA as a visiting research scholar in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. His previous experience includes teaching at the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid and working for many years as an IT consultant in Spain and Latin America. In addition to teaching, he also worked for the Government of Madrid writing strategical reports.
His research interests focus on the Philosophy of Physics and Science and Technology Studies. Among other writings, he co-authored a book now being published in English entitled ‘The New Temple of Knowledge: Towards a Universal Digital Library’. Currently, he is editing a forthcoming monograph in the periodical Arbor entitled ‘Science and Culture on the Web’.
- Alfred Nordmann
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After receiving his Ph.D. in Hamburg (1986) and serving on the faculty of the Philosophy Department at the University of South Carolina (1988-2002), Alfred Nordmann became Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Darmstadt Technical University. His historical interests concern the negotiation of contested fields of scientific knowledge such as theories of electricity and chemistry in the 18th century, mechanics, evolutionary biology, and sociology in the 19th century, nursing science and nanoscale research in the 20th century. In particular, he studied the scientific contributions of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Antoine Lavoisier, Joseph Priestley, Charles Darwin, William Bateson, Heinrich Hertz, and Herbert Gleiter. His epistemological interests concern the trajectory that leads from Immanuel Kant via Heinrich Hertz and Ludwig Wittgenstein to contemporary analyses of models, simulations, and visualizations. From 2003 until 2009 he was president of the Lichtenberg Society.
Since 2000 Nordmann has been studying philosophical and societal dimensions of nanoscience and converging technologies. With Davis Baird he initiated the first NSF-sponsored research team on this subject. Nordmann’s focus is on the development of a comprehensive philosophy of technoscience that reflects recent changes in the culture of science and the changing relationship of science, technology, nature and society. He served as rapporteur for the EU expert group Converging Technologies – Shaping the Future of European Societies (2004). Recent publications include Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2005), "Noumenal Technology: Reflections on the Incredible Tininess of Nano" (Techné 8:3, 2005), "Philosophy of Nanotechnoscience" (in G. Schmid, ed., Nanotechnology: Principles and Fundamentals, Weinheim: Wiley, 2008, pp. 217-244), and Technikphilosophie zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2008) With Davis Baird and Joachim Schummer he edited Discovering the Nanoscale (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2004), with Joachim Schummer and Astrid Schwarz Nanotechnologien im Kontext (Berlin: Akademische Verlagsanstalt, 2006), with Michael Friedman The Kantian Legacy in Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), and most recently a largely bi-lingual volume edited with Stefan Gammel and Andreas Lösch Jenseits von Regulierung: Zum politischen Umgang mit der Nanotechnologie [Beyond Regulation: On the Political Governance of Nanotechnology] (Berlin: Akademische Verlagsanstalt, 2009).
During the 2006/07 academic year, Nordmann was one of the coordinators of the research group Science in the Context of Application at the ZiF of Bielefeld University. Since August 2008 he is Visiting Centenary Professor at the University of South Carolina. In the spring-term of 2009, he served as Alcatel-Lucent Fellow at the IZKT of Stuttgart University.
