UCL JILL DANDO INSTITUTE OF SECURITY AND CRIME SCIENCE

Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science

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Enquiry, Evidence and Facts: An Interdisciplinary Conference

A two-day conference convened by Professor William Twining, FBA, UCL, Professor Mary Morgan, FBA, FKNAW, LSE, Professor Philip Dawid, UCL and Professor Trisha Greenhalgh, UCL. The conference is organised jointly with the Leverhulme Trust/ESRC funded research programmes on “The Nature of Evidence”, “Evidence, Inference and Inquiry: Towards an Integrated Science of Evidence” at UCL and “How well do ‘facts’ travel?” at LSE. Evidence has a high profile in the public eye because of the convergence of a number of recent developments, such as: reliance on new kinds of evidence that are hard to understand or convey yet are critical in individual decisions (e.g. statistical assessment of DNA analysis in courts); the importance of disputed evidence in key policy decisions (e.g. post 9/11 intelligence in the UK, climate change facts in the USA); the use of both social science and natural science evidence together (e.g. decisions about value for money for medical treatments or the way to deal with foot and mouth disease). There is a lack of agreement on the extent to which one can generalise about facts, evidence and inferential reasoning across disciplines, contexts and types of enquiry because of some fundamental questions about the nature of evidence. The aims of the conference are: - to debate the different theoretical, methodological and practical approaches to the study of evidence and the way that facts are acquired and used across different fields - to explore the ways in which facts travel within and between fields, a process essential to generate common multi- or interdisciplinary understandings of how evidence is constituted and used in making judgements - to provide a forum for the presentation of completed and ongoing research on these topics from a broad range of academic and practice-based researchers using a wide range of disciplinary bases in the social sciences and humanities and in related natural science fields - to promote networking and cross-fertilization of ideas amongst researchers and practitioners in the expanding interdisciplinary concern with the nature of facts and evidence and to explore the commonalities of concepts A limited number of places is available. All those interested in attending this conference should register using the online booking form. There will also be poster displays featuring the work of the 'Evidence' research programmes. There will be plenary sessions and three parallel sessions on each day of the conference. When booking, please indicate clearly which parallel session you wish to attend. In addition to the British Academy conference, there will be a satellite meeting organised by UCL on Wednesday 12 December. Attendees at the main event can attend the satellite meeting for a reduced fee of £10. For further information regarding the satellite meeting please contact Dr Matt Twyman (m.twyman@ucl.ac.uk) In addition to the British Academy conference, there will be a satellite meeting organised by UCL on Wednesday 12 December. The registration fee for the satellite meeting is £20. The combined registration for both events is £60. For further information regarding the satellite meeting please contact Dr Matt Twyman (m.twyman@ucl.ac.uk).