Fall 2005
September 19–20
Understanding the Genetics of Sex Effects in Clinical Medicine
Exploratory Seminar; Science
Jill M. Goldstein (Psychiatry, Brigham and Women's/Harvard Medical School, Harvard University)
Louise E. Wilkins-Haug (Obsterics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Biology, Brigham and Women's/Harvard Medical School, Harvard University)
Women and men are at different risks for the onset, expression, course, and treatment response for a number of disorders that occur at different stages of development and throughout the aging process. Still unclear are the mechanisms that explain many of these sex differences or disorders specific to women. Our underlying assumption is that understanding the roles of genes and hormones will, in part, provide the basis for understanding sex-specific vulnerabilities to clinical disorders. Further, we believe that an understanding of the differential vulnerabilities of women and men to particular disorders requires the integration of levels of thought about etiologic mechanisms at the clinical and basic levels; the roles of hormones and genes are of particular concern. How can scientists working in one field of interest relevant to women's health be educated to think about the implications of their work at other levels? How can scientists develop collaborative studies to investigate the interdisciplinary questions that any one field cannot tackle? The purpose of this exploratory seminar is to bring together experts investigating the genetics of sex effects at the basic and clinical levels. Our aim is to initiate dialogue across disciplines and across levels of analysis, to facilitate new collaborations, and to explore translational research around new questions in the field. The invited participants include basic and clinical investigators who have contributed to our understanding of sex chromosome effects, imprinting, hormonal regulation of genes, and/or the implication of these factors for understanding clinical and behavioral outcomes ranging from adverse pregnancy outcomes to adult psychiatric, cognitive, neurologic, cardiovascular, metabolic, and autoimmune disorders with fetal origins.
October 17–18
Solving Darwin's Mystery: The Genomics of Speciation and Modern Approaches to Biodiversity
Exploratory Seminar; Science
Hans A. Hofmann (Bauer Center for Genomics Research, Harvard Univeristy)
Scott Edwards (Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University)
Rob Kulathinal (Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University)
Biologists are currently witnessing a dramatic shift in the ways in which they approach research on fundamental questions. The large and ever-expanding amounts of sequence, annotation, and genome-wide functional data recently collected from long-standing genetic model organisms (e.g., fruit fly, mouse, nematode worm, and mustard weed) compels researchers to consider novel and creative ways to approach genome-scale data sets. More important, genomics offers the unique opportunity to find solutions to eminent biological questions that neither these model systems nor traditional approaches can solve. Understanding speciation, or how species are formed, is the most fundamental unsolved question in evolutionary biology, and we believe that the emerging field of comparative genomics will allow biologists to finally solve this mystery. As a first step, however, we must transfer the knowledge gained from standard genomic models to other, often closely related, groups of species whose biology makes them appealing for the study of diversity and evolution. This exploratory seminar at Radcliffe will assemble a selected group of first-class researchers in order to develop novel strategies and approaches in the new field of "speciation genomics." The immediate goal is twofold: to identify common and tractable questions among biologists who study a wide variety of biological systems and to develop practical resources and tools that would enable researchers interested in various aspects of biodiversity, particularly speciation, to transfer the knowledge of a well-characterized sequenced species to her/his biological system of interest. In addition to organismic diversity, biologists from a diverse spectrum of the genomics field will be invited—bioinformatics, microarray technology, population genomics, and systematics—in order to evaluate how one could tackle problems in biodiversity, including speciation.
October 28–29
Estimations Are Approximations: Multiresolution Modeling and Statistical Inference
Exploratory Seminar; Science
Patrick J. Wolfe (Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University)
Xiao-Li Meng (Statistics, Harvard University)
The core idea of this interdisciplinary exploratory seminar is to elucidate the connection between multiscale methods of nonlinear approximation in engineering and applied mathematics and model-based inference in computational statistics. Multiresolution techniques such as wavelets and other time-frequency/time-scale methods provide a deterministic means of iteratively approximating functions at different scales; when viewed in a probabilistic framework, the resultant models may also be coupled with computational techniques for inference that can overcome analytical insolubility. From the point of view of statistical inference, estimations are approximations, and, hence, in this regard, there is a great degree of unexploited crossover potential between the engineering, mathematics, and statistics communities. To this end, the proposed seminar will bring together researchers whose backgrounds reflect each of these viewpoints in order to facilitate an exchange of ideas and explore new frontiers at the intersection of these areas.
Spring 2006
January 23–24
Parental Risk and Resilience: Relationships with Young Children's Emotional Expressiveness, Language, Learning, and Problem Behaviors Over Time
Advanced Seminar; Social Science
Catherine C. Ayoub (Harvard Medical School/Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard University)
As an outgrowth of the national study on the impact of Early Head Start, a group of researchers has developed a strong interest in exploring the cumulative longitudinal relationships between parental risk and protective factors and child outcomes over time as they are moderated by various Early Head Start and child-care opportunities offered to low-income families with young children across the country. Although there are broad frameworks of risk and resilience from the literature on which this working group will draw, working together with attention to the specific data collected as a part of the Early Head Start research project will result in a series of three research papers that address the longitudinal impact of maternal depression, parenting stress, life crises, and family conflict during the first five years of the child's life. Researchers will be joined by Harvard faculty with expertise in longitudinal statistical analyses in order to further develop the initial statistical work that each presenter has done to explore these issues. This large sample and the longitudinal nature of these data are a good match with new statistical techniques, specifically growth modeling, including multilevel modeling, survival analysis, and structural equation modeling. However, these techniques have not been used with these data before, nor does the literature contain studies that demonstrate the complex relationships between a series of parental/family risk and protective factors and comprehensive child outcomes across the first five years of life in children living in poverty.
February 10–11
What's in a Norm? Exploring the Transnational Bases of Idea Formation and Circulation
Exploratory Seminar; Social Science
Mary D. Lewis (History, Harvard University)
Sanjeev Khagram (Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University)
Peggy Levitt (Public Policy, Wellesley, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University)
Contemporary social life transcends and transforms national boundaries. Social movements mobilize cross-border constituencies around human rights, gender justice, and family values. Religions such as Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity link their believers across wider and wider spaces. Professional associations set globally accepted norms and standards. Hip-hop "heads" in Gugulettu and Rio draw inspiration from their Los Angeles counterparts. These cultural counterparts of economic and political globalization are widely recognized, but little is known about how global culture is actually created and spread. How are global ideas and norms communicated, transferred, translated, and transformed? What are the mechanisms that propel information flows across time and space? What institutions, networks, practices, personalities, or rituals make these flows possible, or, in turn, channel or even block them? What explains why certain ideas and models are appropriated while others are ignored? What happens when global and local cultures meet? The workshop will bring together junior and mid-career scholars to discuss these issues and to form part of an emergent learning community.
April 21–22
Opening up the Archives
Exploratory Seminar; Social Science
Ann Blair (History, Harvard University)
Jennifer Milligan (History and Literature, Harvard University)
Archives have long been central to historical research but have only recently become objects of historical inquiry in their own right. Attention to the archive in anthropology, literature, and philosophy has emphasized the archive (often taken metaphorically) as a locus of political and epistemological power. This seminar will take an historical approach, one informed by readings in other disciplines, to study archives as institutions in different time-place contexts. We will give a special focus on the politics of access to and use of the archives and on the political and intellectual stakes of the organization of documents. Our scope is comparative (excluding the United States) and will bring together specialists of early modern Europe, of early modern and modern colonial contexts, and of modern Europe and China to explore common themes and contextual differences in this new area of historical research.
The seminar resulted in the creation of a web resource, which may be found at http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k12884, for continued scholarship and research.
May 5–6
Global Articulations: Realignments of Personhood and Language
Exploratory Seminar; Social Science
Smita Lahiri (Anthropology, Harvard University)
Janet McIntosh (Anthropology, Brandeis University)
We intend this seminar as an exploration of the role of language in globalized processes; we will give particular attention to the articulations between globalization, language, and personhood. Our discussions will focus on the domains of language-in-use, language ideologies, and modalities of communication as we examine the words, speech events, codes, and media formats that index globalization, embed themselves in its processes, and give form to the experiences of those contending with it in their daily lives. In particular, we will explore the ways that these linguistic considerations mediate the relationship between globalization and "personhood" in the sense of situated models of what it means to be an agentive, economically viable, morally accountable person in a specific setting. We are designing this seminar in hopes of generating productive dialogue between those who identify centrally as "linguistic anthropologists" and those whose scholarship speaks to globalization and personhood but who wish to acquire tools for thinking more deeply about these matters through language.
May 5–6
Search for Biomarkers of Female Reproductive Function
Exploratory Seminar; Social Science/Science
Janet Rich-Edwards (Ambulatory Care and Prevention, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University)
Women exposed to chronic hardship appear to experience a faster decline in reproductive function as they age, a phenomenon known as "weathering." To date, empirical support for the "weathering hypothesis" has rested on cross-sectional analyses, which are limited in their ability to demonstrate that change in environment precipitates change in reproductive function. True tests of "weathering" require longitudinal analysis of repeated measures of reproductive function or aging. If we could identify a set of noninvasive biomarkers of reproductive function—factors that we could measure serially as a sort of reproductive "clock"—we would be better able to examine the impact of environment on puberty, fertility, pregnancy outcomes, and menopause. Recent advances in the search for general biomarkers of aging, while still controversial, may yield biomarkers of female reproductive function. The seminar will convene experts in the fields of reproductive epidemiology, physiology of aging, mammalian reproductive physiology, and biological anthropology for an open exploration of whether noninvasive biomarkers of female reproductive function can be identified.
May 12–13
Ecological Genetics of Arabidopsis thaliana
Exploratory Seminar; Science
Kathleen Donohue (Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University)
New genomic tools that are being developed in model organisms have the potential to be applied to diverse fields well beyond molecular genetics. This symposium focuses on the ecological genetics of Arabidopsis thaliana, the model genetic organism for flowering plants. A. thaliana has long been used as a model plant for physiological, biochemical, and developmental genetic studies because an enormous diversity of genetic tools has been developed in this species. Much more recently, a small community of evolutionary biologists, and ecologists in particular, have begun to use A. thaliana to address fundamental questions of population biology and ecological processes of adaptation. New ecological applications of these genetic and genomic tools have enabled researchers to characterize for the first time the molecular genetic basis of adaptation and population processes. The aim of this symposium is to facilitate collaborations across diverse fields such as molecular biology, developmental genetics, population genetics, ecology, and population biology. We will discuss novel ecological applications of newly developed genetic tools in A. thaliana, future development of ecologically relevant genetic resources, and future research collaborations.
May 12–13
Hellenistic Science and Scholarship
Exploratory Seminar; Humanities
Mark J. Schiefsky (Classics, Harvard University
Francesca Schironi (Classics, Harvard University)
Between the third and first centuries BCE, scholars and scientists working at the library and museum of Alexandria made astonishing advances in science, technology, and scholarship. The seminar will bring together an internationally renowned group of specialists to explore the interdisciplinary nature of these achievements. The fields to be considered will include grammar and scholarship, astronomy, geography, mathematics, mechanics, medicine, optics, and material culture. Among the key questions to be discussed will be the nature and flexibility of disciplinary boundaries, the establishment and stability of technical terminologies, the methodological affinities between different disciplines, the role of royal patronage and social institutions in stimulating intellectual development, and the transmission of knowledge between Alexandria and other centers of science and learning. Each participant will lead a two-hour discussion of key primary and secondary texts in his or her field of specialization.
June 1–2
Pragmatism and the Social Sciences
Exploratory Seminar; Social Science
Chris Winship (Sociology, Harvard University)
Archon Fung (Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University)
In the early years of the twentieth century, the ideas of the classical American pragmatist philosophers Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead were of seminal importance to American social science. They inspired and shaped research programs as diverse as functionalist psychology, urban ethnography, institutional economics, and legal realism. After a period of declining prominence midcentury, pragmatism reemerged in the 1980s and 1990s as a major force on the intellectual landscape, a reemergence that once again spilled over to affect the social sciences. In sociology, where the tradition of symbolic interactionism, based on a reading of Mead's work, had been a site of activity since the 1960s, theorists and empirical researchers not wedded to the interactionist paradigm began considering pragmatism again; they used it to address longstanding questions about social action, intersubjectivity, rationality, and methodology. In political science, pragmatism became important to discussions of deliberative democracy and collective problem solving, while at the intersection of economics and sociology the tradition was mobilized to help theorize from a fresh angle the nature of economic rationality and its institutional embeddedness. Key questions about pragmatism's capacity to inform social science remain unanswered, however. Is pragmatism's emphasis on the creativity of action at odds with the deterministic orientation of explanatory social science? Can the notion of intersubjectivity and, with it, the idea of "joint action" be theorized in such a way as to be formally modeled and its significance for social outcomes assessed? What lessons would a pragmatist epistemology teach for social science, and what methods would it suggest as most appropriate for the study of social phenomena? This exploratory seminar will bring together—for the first time—leading pragmatist social scientists to discuss these issues, to hammer out new agendas for research, and to lay the groundwork for an edited volume on the topic of pragmatism and social science that would stimulate debate and foster additional research and theorization.
