The University of Notre Dame’s Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values will sponsor an international conference titled “The Commerce and Politics of Science” from Sept. 21 to 24 (Thursday to Sunday) at McKenna Hall.
The conference will examine how commercial and political interests have shaped, and continue to shape, scientific knowledge and practice. It also will consider whether one or another economic or political context is favorable or unfavorable to science and is more, or less, likely to produce “good science.”
Keynote speakers for the conference include Sheldon Krimsky, professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University; Robert Berdahl, president of the Association of American Universities; and Philip Mirowski, Notre Dame’s Carl E. Koch Professor of Economics and Policy Studies.
The conference will feature sessions on “Democracy and the Commercialization of Science,” “Commercialization and the Philosophy of Science,” “Commerce, Politics, and Science in the United States and the European Union: Comparative Perspectives,” “Commercialization and Technology Transfer in the University,” and “Scholarly Duties and Private Interest Science.”
The conference has been organized in collaboration with the University of Bielefeld, Germany, to allow for an international dimension and regional comparisons.
In addition to the Reilly Center, the conference is sponsored by Notre Dame’s Nanovic Institute for European Studies and Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.
Established in 1985, the Reilly Center seeks to make a distinctive contribution to the humanistic understanding of science and technology.
More information on the conference is at http://www.nd.edu/~reilly/compolsci.html .
Originally published by at newsinfo.nd.edu on September 18, 2006.