Post Type: Notices & Tips

Online Seminar: Bureaucracy as Knowledge

~ Editors

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.

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Debating New Approaches to Histories of the Sciences

~ Editors

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.

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‘The Political and the Epistemic’ in ‘KNOW’

~ Editors

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)

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Call: History of Intellectual Culture

~ Editors

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.

Editorial Team Changes

~ Editors

A little over a year ago, Kerstin von der Krone joined Goethe University Frankfurt am Main as head of the J. C. Senckenberg University Library's Judaica Division. As a result, she is stepping back from day-to-day involvement with this blog. Mark Stoneman, an editor–historian at the German Historical Institute Washington DC (GHI), remains, and three colleagues, all GHI research fellows, are joining him: Anna-Carolin Augustin, Mario Peters, and Claudia Roesch.