New Approaches, Methods, and Topics in the History of Science
Historical epistemology has long been a guiding principle of research at the Max Planck Institute of the History of Science, Berlin. Its historical epistemology has developed into four major directions: evolutionary and structural issues (Dept. I), naturalization of concepts (Dept, II), objects and materials (Dept III, Rheinberger, retired), and action and agency (Dept. III, Schäfer). With this series of three workshops the Institute is looking ahead, asking major voices in the field to unfold their view to the most promising directions in the history of science.
All events in this workshop series invite participants to probe into new conceptual and methodological frameworks that have been developed recently to research the complexities of interactions between epistemic, economic and political structures. Participants are asked to present their view on the challenges and/or chances of research on “political epistemology” for the history of science: What are the dynamics of scientific and sociopolitical development and in which way can their interaction—and the way in which it transforms both—be understood? How should it be pursued, which methods can be applied and what topics are of concern?
The term "political epistemology" highlights the role that social and normative conditions—political, economic, cultural—play in knowledge production and exchange. There is an urgent need to understand the political and economic conditions and the normative assumptions under which such knowledge was historically generated and enacted. It is obvious that these social conditions create the framework within which science is supported, valued and rewarded, taught, censored, or monopolized. But it is less clear how this framework shapes the knowledge produced under its constraints: what is known (and not known), how it is known, and how long it is known. Knowledge has an intrinsic political dimension.
The dynamics of scientific and sociopolitical development interact in ways that transform both. This is not only a matter of, for example, political ideologies colouring scientific claims, or of scientific innovations triggering political controversies—themes already intensively studied by historians and sociologists of science. It is also a matter of what is deemed to be genuine knowledge—its sources, methods, evidence, and forms—in short, its normative conditions and consequences. The question of how the political dimension and, thus, questions of power can be more systematically included in the historical analysis of knowledge production is still open to debate.
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First Workshop—November 29, 2016
Image by Justin Marquis, http://amorfatiandampersand.blogspot.de/2016_01_01_archive.html Program:
09:30 Welcome
Chair: Ana Simões (Universidade de Lisboa)
09:45
Carsten Reinhardt (University of Bielefeld)
Regulatory Politics and Material Knowledge10:30 Coffee Break
Chair: Rivka Feldhay (Tel Aviv University; emer.)
10:45
Angela Creager (Princeton University)
Environmental Risk and Regulation11:30
Hannah Landecker (University of California at Los Angeles)
Antibiotic Resistance and The Biology of History12:15 Lunch Break (lunch will be provided for speakers and specially invited guests only)
Chair: Gerd Grasshoff (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
13:00
Myles Jackson (New York University/ Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin)
The Commodification of the Body and its Practices: Histories of Biology and Physics13:45
Michael Gordin (Princeton University)
Infrastructure, Pressure, Demarcation: Historicizing Political Epistemology14:30 Coffee Break
Chair: Jed Buchwald (California Institute of Technology)
14:45
Ariane Leendertz (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne)
Complexity Theory, Public Policy, and the Exhaustion of Solutionism15:30
Kärin Nickelsen (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich)
Shifting Frameworks: Scientific Epistemology and the Political16:15 Coffee Break
16:30
Round Table & Summary with Thomas Duve (chair), Jed Buchwald, Rivka Feldhay, Gerd Grasshoff, Ana Simões
18:15 End
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Second Workshop—March 23, 2017
Image by Justin Marquis, http://amorfatiandampersand.blogspot.de/2016_01_01_archive.html Program:
09:30 Welcome
Chair: Markus Asper (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
09:45
Andrea Bréard (Heidelberg University/Université Sciences et Technologies Lille 1)
Reading Numbers Otherwise: Towards a Critique of Numerical Reason
10:30
Moritz Epple (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Epistemic and Political Configurations: Some Remarks on the Interactions of Scientific and Political Practice
11:15 Coffee Break
Chair: Viktoria Tkaczyk (MPIWG)
11:30
Sean Hsiang-lin Lei (Academia Sinica)
Science as Modernity in East Asia
12:15
Eden Medina (Indiana University)
Science on the March in the Global South
13:00 Lunch Break (lunch will be provided for speakers and specially invited guests only)
Chair: Matteo Valleriani (MPIWG)
13:45
Manfred Laubichler (Arizona State University)
The Political Economy of Microbiome Research
14:30
Maurizio Meloni (Sheffield University)
A Political-Epistemological Quadrant: Human Heredity in Europe 1910–1930 and the Unstable Politics of Nature-Nurture
15:15
Oliver Schlaudt (Heidelberg University)
Knowledge in the Web of Life. From Political Economy to Political Epistemology
16:00 Coffee Break
Chair: Ursula Klein (MPIWG)
16:30
David Kaiser (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Ideology, Access, and Infrastructure: Writing a Political History of Cold War Physics
17:15
Dennis Lehmkuhl (California Institute of Technology)
The Discovery of Gravitational Waves: Narrative and Facts
18:00 Summary
18:15 End
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Third Workshop—May 11, 2017
Details to be released soon.
Image by Justin Marquis, http://amorfatiandampersand.blogspot.de/2016_01_01_archive.html Program:
09:00 Welcome
Chair: Viktoria Tkaczyk (MPIWG)
09:15 Maria Rentetzi (National Technical Uniersity of Athens)
Why Political Epistemology, and Why Now? Science, Diplomacy and International Organizations
10:00 Pietro Omodeo (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
Situating Political Historical Epistemology: From Structures to Hegemonies.
10:45 Coffee Break
Chair: Christine von Oertzen (MPIWG)11:00 Dana Jalobeanu (University of Bucharest)
Encoded Collaborative Practices and the Fictional Politics of (Scientific) Collaboration: Solomon Houses in Early Modern Europe
11:45 Nadin Heé (Freie Universität Berlin)
The Politics of Trans-Imperial Knowledge: Sustaining Ocean Regimes
12:30 Lunch Break (lunch will be provided for speakers and specially invited guests only)
Chair: Ursula Klein (MPIWG)13:15 Franz Mauelshagen (Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam)
Transformative Knowledge and Planetary Politics in the Anthropocene
14:00 Petra Dolata (University of Calgary)
Between High Modernism and Economic Nationalism: The Politics of Arctic Science and Technology in Canada in the 1970s.
14:45 Coffee Break
Chair: Elaine Leong (MPIWG)15:00 Sabrina Peric (University of Calgary)
The Poetics and Politics of Expertise, or How Petroleum Geologists Built a State in the Canadian Boreal
15:45 Hiromi Mizuno (University of Minnesota)
Mutant Rice and Political Epistemology.
16:45 End
cancelled:Angelo Cattaneo (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
Toward a Global Geography of Languages. Mapping Amerindian, African and Asian Languages through Portuguese and Latin in Early Modernity (16th–18th centuries). Does it matter to the History of Science?Georg Töpfer (Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin)
The Political Epistemology of Biodiversity -
Talk—July 13, 2017
Chair: Matteo Valleriani (MPIWG)
12:00 Jessica Riskin (Stanford University)
The Restless Clock -
Fourth Workshop—September 8, 2017
Chair: Elaine Leong (MPIWG)
14:00 Angelo Cattaneo (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
Toward a Global Geography of Languages. Mapping Amerindian, African and Asian Languages through Portuguese and Latin in Early Modernity (16th–18th centuries). Does it matter to the History of Science?14:50 Georg Töpfer (Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin)
The Political Epistemology of Biodiversity15:40 Get-together with coffee & tea
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Talk—October 17, 2017
Chair: Viktoria Tkaczyk (MPIWG)
14:00 Nicole Karafyllis (Technische Universität Braunschweig)
On Collecting and Interpreting Biofacts -
Talk—November 23, 2017
14:00 Andrea Westermann (GHI West - Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute Washington DC)
Title: tba