The International Conference on Science in 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.

Patrick Baert
Marco Battaglia
Jonathan Hare
Yolanda Moses
Michael A Peters

Garden Conversation Sessions

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

Patrick Baert
Patrick Baert is Fellow of Selwyn College and Reader in Social Theory at the University of Cambridge. He developed a new perspective on philosophy of social science, inspired by American neo-pragmatism and Continental hermeneutics. Amongst his publications are Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards Pragmatism (2005), Social Theory in the Twentieth Century (1998) and Time, Self and Social Being (1992). He was Vice-President for Publications of the European Sociological Association and President of its Social Theory Network.

Marco Battaglia
Marco Battaglia obtained his MSc at the University of Milano in Italy and his PhD at the University of Helsinki in 1999, while working at CERN, Geneva. He held a research staff position at CERN before joining the Physics Faculty at Berkeley in 2003.

Battaglia is an experimental particle physicist with interests in the production and decay processes of heavy quarks, origin of matter and of electro-weak symmetry breaking. He also researches the nature of new physics, beyond the established Standard Model of electro-weak interactions.

Answering the main questions arising in these areas requires close interactions with phenomenologists as well as innovative particle accelerators and detectors. He analyzes experimental data based on new methods recently proposed by theorists and contributes to the studies of new accelerators, including the new Silicon detector, for application in collider experiments.

At CERN, he worked on heavy quark decays with the DELPHI detector. For the last decade, he has worked in experimental physics using a high energy, high luminosity linear collider, and performed R&D work on new detectors needed to fully exploit its potential.


Jonathan Hare
Dr. Jonathan Hare is a freelance science communicator. His PhD work with Sir Harry Kroto lead to a method of making the football molecule C60, Buckminsterfullerene. He has worked as a ‘Time Lord’ at the National Physical laboratory working with atomic clocks as well as with British Gas developing a gas powered car. He has been on all the BBC / OU Rough Science (6 series) and Hollywood Science (2 series) TV programmes. He is currently a visiting research fellow at Sussex University. He loves making things, juggling, hill walking, amateur radio and painting.

Yolanda Moses
Dr. Yolanda Moses served as President of the American Anthropological Association, Chair of the Board of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, Past President of City University of New York/ The City College, and President of the American Association for Higher Education. She currently serves as Professor of Anthropology, Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Excellence, and Executive Director for Conflict Resolution at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. Moses’ research focuses on the broad question of the origins of social inequality in complex societies through the use of comparative ethnographic and survey methods. She has explored gender and class disparities in the Caribbean, East Africa and in the United States. More recently, her research has focused on issues of diversity and change in universities and colleges in the United States, India, and South Africa.She is currently involved with several national higher education projects with the National Council for Research on Women, Campus Women Lead and The Women of Color Research Collective. In addition, she is Chair of the National Advisory Board of a multi-year national public education project sponsored by the American Anthropological Association and funded by NSF and the Ford Foundation on Race and Human Variation. See: www.understandingrace.org.

She is the co-author also with Carol Mukhopadhyay and Rosemary Henze, Professors at CSU San Jose of the book: How Real is Race: A Sourcebook on Race, Culture and Biology. (2007) Rowman and Littlefield.

Moses is currently a consultant to the American Council on Education’s Project, on linking International and Diversity Issues, and to the recent publication, At Home in the World: Bridging the Gap between Internationalization and Multicultural Education (2007). She is currently a faculty member in the Salzburg Seminar‘s ISP Program.

She has also held senior faculty appointments at George Washington University as a visiting Researcher, and as Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate University.


Michael A Peters
Michael A Peters is Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed his Bachelor’s degree in English Literature, and an honors degree in Geography, before attaining his teaching diploma and teaching in New Zealand high schools for seven years, the last two as head of department. While teaching he completed a major for a Bachelor of Science in Philosophy and returned full time to complete his Master in Philosophy, with first class honors, and PhD in Philosophy of Education with a thesis on the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. He has just completed a second book on the subject entitled Wittgenstein as Pedagogical Philosopher (Paradigm Press, 2008) with Nick Burbules and Paul Smeyers. He held a personal chair at the University of Auckland, NZ (2000-03) and Research Professor at the University of Glasgow, UK (2000-05), as well as numerous posts as adjunct and visiting professor throughout the world. He is the executive editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory (Blackwell) and editor of two international ejournals, Policy Futures in Education and E-Learning (both with Symposium) and sits on the editorial board of over fifteen international journals. He has written over thirty-five books and three hundred articles and chapters, including most recently: Global Citizenship Education (Sense, 2008); Global Knowledge Cultures (Sense, 2007); Subjectivity and Truth: Foucault, Education and the Culture of Self (Peter Lang, 2007); Why Foucault? New Directions in Educational Research (Peter Lang, 2007), Building Knowledge Cultures: Educational and Development in the Age of Knowledge Capitalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), and Knowledge Economy, Development and the Future of the University (Sense, 2007). He has a strong research interests in distributed knowledge systems, digital scholarship and elearning systems and has acted as an advisor to government on these and related matters in Scotland, NZ, South Africa and the EU.