Ecological Dynamics and Contagion
CONTAGION: cross disciplinary tools for understanding and modelling change
The Contagion project is hosting three workshops, organised through the Society, Technology and Culture Theme of the HASS Strategy and funded and supported by Bridging the Gaps.
A Research Services research event | |
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Date | 23 April 2013 |
Time | 11:00 to 16:00 |
Place | Queens Building MR3 |
Provider | Research Services |
Organizer | Lois Spence |
Event details
Contagion
In the last decades there have been heightened attempts to theorise, model and manage the risks of social, financial and biological contagion (Peckham 2013). While the metaphor is widely used, the rules for defining contagions are no longer clear. If contagion emerged as a concern with intimate sexual contact in the 16th Century, and was translated into fear of urban crowds in the 19th Century, and to unease with globalisation in the 20th Century, the 21st Century is coming to terms with the changing coordinates of those contacts, new proximities and distances, new kinds of mediation, aggregation and link-breaking, new vocabularies for affective politics, and a concern with the movement of movement itself (Thrift 2011). As a result, there's a need to develop resources for understanding how contemporary contagions work and a need to critically evaluate the limits and consequences of analogizing biological, financial and communication processes under the rubric of contagion.
Workshop 1
We will explore the questions: how are networks understood and modelled in the life and social sciences? How does cooperation in social networks evolve and how, in turn, do linkages change as a result? Disease ecologists, social network analysts, social scientists and artists are employing similar tools and vocabularies from super-spreaders to hotspots, co-evolution and emergence. How can these practitioners share techniques and learn from one another?
Agenda
11.00 Arrival, coffee and tea
11.15 Introduction
Professor Steve Hinchliffe (Geography, University of Exeter)
11.30 Super-spreaders of disease. Are the most infected the most connected?
Dr Sarah Perkins (Biosciences, Cardiff University)
12.00 The evolution of co-operation in social networks
Dr Darren Croft (Psychology, University of Exeter)
12.30 Discussion
13.00 Lunch
14.00 Material proximities and hotspots: Towards an anthropology of viral haemorrhagic fevers
Dr Ann Kelly (Anthropology, University of Exeter)
14.30 Parasite: A digital artwork in progress
Dr Deborah Robinson (Art and Media, University of Plymouth)
15.00 Discussion
Following workshops
• Workshop 2: Social media, reality mining and new species of contagion – 14th May
• Workshop 3: Finance, contagion and complex systems – June/ July
Location:
Queens Building MR3