Science, Technology, and Environmental Studies

Blog

  • Another co-curricular opportunity ~ with our own Dr. Glennan, Jan. 28th

    Brown Bag Series – “The New Mechanical Philosophy” by Stuart Glennan

    The Butler Brown Bag Series for Research, Scholarship, and Creative Work presents “The New Mechanical Philosophy” by Stuart Glennan, Philosophy and Religion, on Tuesday, January 28, noon-1:00 p.m. in AU111 (UClub).

    Natural and social scientists often characterize their work as a search for the mechanisms responsible for the phenomena they study. While this way of thinking about the nature of science has its origins in 17th century philosophy, contemporary philosophers of science have only recently begun to think about mechanisms. The result has been an explosion of work on the nature of mechanisms, and their relation to causation, explanation, modeling, and discovery that has come to be known as the New Mechanical Philosophy.

    Please join us for a discussion with Stuart Glennan on his sabbatical research for his book on this emerging area in the philosophy of science.

    Students, staff, and faculty are all welcome. No RSVP required. Light refreshments will be provided – please feel free to bring your lunch.

  • Fun at the STS party!

  • 1st co-curricular opportunity of 2014 ~ Daniel Levitin, cognitive psychologist, January 28, 7:30

    Butler University’s J. James Woods Lectures in the Sciences and Mathematics presents cognitive psychologist Daniel Levitin at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 28 in the Howard L. Schrott Center for the Arts.

    Levitin, the James McGill Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at McGill University, is the author of the book This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (Dutton/Penguin, 2006), which stayed on The New York Times and The (Toronto) Globe and Mail bestseller lists for more than 16 months. Two award-winning documentaries based on “This Is Your Brain On Music” have been broadcast internationally: The Music Instinct co-starred Levitin and Bobby McFerrin, and The Musical Brain co-starred Levitin and Sting.

    As a musician (tenor saxophone, guitar, and bass), he has performed with Mel Tormé, Nancy Wilson, David Byrne, Roseanne Cash, Sting, Bobby McFerrin, Rodney Crowell, Victor Wooten, Blue Öyster Cult, members of the Steve Miller Band, and Santana.

    Levitin earned his doctorate in cognitive psychology from the University of Oregon. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, where he taught courses in the psychology, computer science, human biology, music, and anthropology departments, and the School of Education. He has also been a visiting professor in psychology at UC Berkeley and Dartmouth.

  • STS Party (NOT a meeting!) ~ Friday, January 17th, 6-10 pm, Efroymson Center

    Join us for an STS party.

    This is not a meeting; just a time to enjoy friends, food, and music.

    When: Friday, January 17, 2013, 6:00-10:00 pm

    Where: The Efroymson Center for Creative Writing (across from BUDP and Ross Hall)

    WHO: STS majors, minors, or anyone who is interested:)

    There will be a live band, free dinner (Yats), and a photo booth.

    RSVP to Mary Proffitt, mproffit@butler.edu, by Thursday, January 16th at noon!

  • Seasons Greetings and welcome to our new STS director

    Dear friends of STS —

    With the close of this semester I will be ending my short stint as interim director.  I will be replaced by the new permanent director, Dr. Carmen Salsbury.  Dr. Salsbury, who for the past six years has served as chair of the department of biological sciences, brings a lot of energy, a focus on student learning, a wealth of administrative experience, and a passion for studying the behavior of squirrels (In her honor that’s a sciurus carolinensis in the Santa hat).

    Dr. Salsbury will take over January 2, but she and I will be working together over the coming months on the transition and on the search for the new full-time STS instructor.  That search is, by the way, going well.  We have received many quality applications, and expect to be bringing finalists to campus in February or March.

    I have enjoyed working with so many of you over the last semester, and I look forward to continuing to work with STS as an instructor, advisor and a member of the steering committee.  Have a good holiday, and make sure to come to our STS party on Friday January 17 so the we can welcome our new director.

    Stuart Glennan

     

  • Announcing our affiliate faculty!

    Who are the STS faculty?  Since STS is a program that draws on the expertise of faculty across the university, this can be a bit hard to figure out — until now.  Starting this semester we are beginning to officially designate faculty whose research, teaching and service supports STS as affiliate faculty.  These are the faculty members who will teach most of your classes, be your advisors, supervise your internships, and show up at STS events.  Most of these faculty members have been helping STS for years, but now we want to acknowledge them, and make them more identifiable to our students.  You can check out our list on the STS website:

    http://www.butler.edu/science-technology/faculty-and-staff/

    And if you’ve had a professor teach an STS class and they aren’t on this list, they probably forgot their application.  You can remind them 🙂

     

  • STS Connect – New STS Club – call out lunch

    Exciting News! – STS is starting a club! 

    Hey Everyone, 

    Currently we are underway in establishing our first STS club here at Butler University. It will be called, “STS Connect.” This is really exciting because STS is becoming a well-known major at Butler. Because it is a growing major, more and more people are beginning to wonder what exactly it is and being a part of STS Connect, will be a great way to educate, promote, and encourage more students in the growing field. Having this club established will allow us to network and connect with potential internships and with current and past STS majors. Students will also be given the opportunity to interact with the community through community service projects not only in the Butler community, but in Indianapolis as well. We are really excited to get this started and hope that you are too!

    Our first call out meeting is This Friday December 6, 2013 in Jordan 238 at 12 p.m. Pizza will be provided. We encourage everyone and anyone who is interested, even if a little, to come and join this historical moment (it’ll be really FUN).  Please RSVP to Mary Proffitt (mproffit@butler.edu) so she knows how much pizza to order.

     

    We hope to see you all there! 

    Allie Deno ’16

    Mimi Fisher ‘16

    Brandon Katz ’16

    Jim Santos ‘16

  • Literature and the Environment: Another STS elective

    I just realized that we had failed to share with you another course for spring  2014 that can serve as an STS elective.  This looks very interesting — especially for those of you interested in environmental studies.

    EN393: Into the Wild – Literature and the Environment

    This class will explore wilderness and its relationship to human culture. Our concern throughout will be on a concept, the idea of wilderness, as it evolves in the nature writing tradition. We tend to think of wilderness spatially, as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man is a visitor who does not remain” (Wilderness Act of 1964). And we will examine wilderness in terms of specific locales: John Muir’s Sierra, Edward Abbey’s red-rimmed deserts, the old-growth forests of Gary Snyder’s far west, Barry Lopez’s arctic, the archipelagic outposts of Robert MacFarlane’s Britain. For these and other writers from H. D. Thoreau to Aldo Leopold, wilderness offered in turns scenery, solitude, spiritual communion, recreation, and scientific study, and their experiences encourage us to think wilderness in different terms. Might we not consider wilderness temporally: does a familiar place become wild in the deep pitch of night? Or in terms of climate: is a snow-clad peak more wild than that same height greened by wildflowers? To what extent is wilderness a state of mind?

    We will also take up recent responses to the received notion of wilderness. Kathleen Jamie provides a feminist critique of a strain of wilderness writing by what she calls the “lone enraptured male,” while Evelyn White reminds us that how we think about the wild is shaped by gender and race. The very idea of wilderness as a place where “man is a visitor who does not remain” is challenged by Luther Standing Bear and Leslie Marmon Silko, who attest to a long native American inhabitance of these lands. Moreover, recent work by ecologists and cultural geographers has suggested that the primeval wilderness we associate with the European settlement of North America is a historical aberration. Today, as wilderness continues to bleed from the world, we will ask ourselves how nature writing might re-wild our own imaginations.

  • Check your audit

    A common and important question for STS majors is: what counts towards my STS degree?  In theory, the best way to answer this and other questions about graduation requirements is by reviewing your academic requirements (what everyone calls your degree audit)  in the Student Center of My.Butler.  I say, “in theory” because in order the audits to work, the audit must be correctly programmed by the registrar to know what courses count as STS electives in any given semester — and that has not been the case for STS.

    This semester I have been working with the STS steering committee and the registrar’s office to bring course information up to date, and at this point we are close to an audit that you and your adviser can trust.  Now I need your help.  I would be grateful if all of you (especially those who are juniors and seniors) would check your audit.  It should tell you all courses that you have completed or are presently enrolled in that can count toward the STS major.  If you have taken a course that you thought would count, and it is not on your audit, you need to let me know. 

    You can find your audit on My.Butler.  Here are the instructions:

    Login and click  Self Service > Student Center. In the Academics area, under the Other Academics dropdown, select Academic Requirements and click on the button. Your advising audit appears onscreen. Requirement areas that haven’t been completely fulfilled yet will automatically be expanded. Sections of the audit that are minimized have already been satisfied.

    When you get there, you may find it helpful to click the button that allows you to see the report in PDF format.  I personally like this, because it lists all the courses you have taken towards the STS elective requirement in a single table, so you don’t have to scroll through 100+ options.

  • ‘Even Me—a film about HIV – A cocurricular opportunity

    ‘Even Me—a film about HIV

    There’s going to be a terrific short film on campus this Saturday.  It’s called “Even Me” and it’s about the HIV/AIDS crisis among people ages 50 and older, especially in communities of color.  The film was made by Megan Ebor, who works with older adults in southern California.  She will be at the screening to talk about the film.  The film is part of the10th annual Indiana HIV Awareness Day, a partnership project of the Indiana Minority Health Coalition and others.  This screening is sponsored by the STS Program, the College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, and the Department of Sociology & Criminology.  It’s in PB 150 1:00-3:00. 

    You can check out the film’s wesite at this address:

    http://www.evenmefilm.com/