Occasional notes on calls, events, publications, and more that caught our attention. Please tweet or email us your own items.
Author: Editors
Online Seminar: Bureaucracy as Knowledge
History of Knowledge Seminar Series @ Utrecht University
“Bureaucracy as Knowledge” with Christine von Oertzen (MPIWG, Berlin) and Sebastian Felten (University of Vienna)
Thursday, June 10, 2021, 15:30-17:00 (CET)
Online via Microsoft Teams (registration not required)
Bureaucracy was a term of critique that in Europe around 1900 became an analytical concept for world-historical comparison, most prominently in the work of Max Weber. Against this background, the multi-authored publication Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge develops a non-Weberian approach of analysing bureaucratic procedures as knowledge processes, a method we term “bureaucracy as knowledge.” This approach builds on historical epistemology and aims to recover actors’ ways of organising social and natural world rather than to judge them by modernist, Western standards. We found surprising similarities across our cases, such as the use of questionnaires in the medieval Latin West and in colonial German New Guinea, or of calendars in the Ottoman Empire and Central Europe.
Summer Course: Knowledge Organisation in the Middle Ages
Knowledge Notes: Calls and Events
Calls
Publication: Cripping the Archive: Disability, Power, and History, edited by Jenifer Barclay and Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy.
– Deadline: June 14, 2021.
– FYI: What “Cripping” Means.
Debating New Approaches to Histories of the Sciences
All are invited to attend the online symposium “Debating New Approaches to Histories of the Sciences,” organized as part of the History of Knowledge Seminar Series @ Utrecht University.
Friday, May 21, 2021, 9:30–17:30 CET
Online via Microsoft Teams (registration not required)
Recent decades have seen the emergence of a number of promising new approaches to the historical study of the sciences. All share the goal of understanding scientific thinking and practice as historical phenomena, but each does so in its own distinctive way: created against different backgrounds and in response to different problem situations within and outside academia they orient themselves around different themes, topics and perspectives. This raises the issue of whether and if so, how, these approaches could best collaborate.
Continue reading “Debating New Approaches to Histories of the Sciences”
Knowledge Notes: Upcoming Events
Workshop: What Does South-to-South Mean for Cold War Science and Technology in Asia?
– Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
– May 10, 2021, 4:00–6:30 p.m. CET
‘The Political and the Epistemic’ in ‘KNOW’
The Fall 2020 issue of KNOW focuses on a specific theme: "The Political and the Epistemic in the Twentieth Century: Historical Perspectives." Emphasizing the first half of the twentieth century, in particular, guest editors Kijan Espahangizi and Monika Wulz point to an emerging "politicized understanding of scientific inquiry" in the interwar period, which "shaped a new social epistemology." (163) The starting point for the contributors to this issue is the interrelation between "heated disputes over the political and economic foundations of society" and the equally contested and pressing debates about "the role of knowledge in society and the economy." (163) The payoff:
By analyzing histories of antagonistic and competitive forms of knowledge, it becomes possible to paint a more detailed picture of not only the relations between the epistemic and the political but also of the inherently political strategies involved in the boundary work of knowledge regimes. (166)
Continue reading “‘The Political and the Epistemic’ in ‘KNOW’”
Knowledge Notes
A periodic round-up of events, positions, calls, and more, this time including podcasts
Call: History of Intellectual Culture
Charlotte A. Lerg, Johan Östling, and Jana Weiß are editing a new open-access publication called the History of Intellectual Culture: International Yearbook of Knowledge and Society (HIC), which will be published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg. The first issue is planned for the spring/summer of 2022, and they are seeking contributions in the history of knowledge. See the call for further details. Proposal deadline: May 17, 2021. Article submission: September 6, 2021.
Knowledge Notes
