April 2008

Rina Knoeff and Robert Zwijnenberg at the Department of Art History in Leiden are announcing two ph.d. studentships in their research project ‘Cultures of Collecting: The Leiden Anatomical Collections in Context’.

The project studies how “historical and cultural practices and concerns have shaped anatomical preparations and how exhibitions of the anatomical body have informed cultural imagery of the body”—with the ultimate aim to understand “the dynamics of anatomical collections as cultural and academic heritage and seeks to formulate positions on the relationships between the anatomical museum, popular culture and academic medicine” (read more about the project here).

One PhD student is supposed to look at how the early modern collections of Leiden University “were rooted in ideals of perfection in different fields of knowledge and expertise”, while the other is directed at “the historical and educational import of the Leiden University nineteenth-century pathological collections” (read more here).

More info from Rina Knoeff at R.Knoeff@let.leidenuniv.nl. Deadline is 1 May 2008.

The second five minute report from Medical Museion on the history of medicine made by a crew from Swedish TV was sent last Monday (7 April). See it here (run the clip approx. 6’30” into the programme).

For the first programme in the series, see here (click “Fråga doktorn 080331″ and run the clip forward until about 8’40”). The third five-minute episode will be sent directly Monday 21 April at 6.15.

Joint university and museum PhD programmes is a great idea. But what about pre-specified, detailed project announcements? I thought about this when I saw an announcement on the Mersenne list this morning about two Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) PhD studentships in history of science, technology and medicine.

The posts are announced as collaborative research projects between on the one hand the Division of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds and on the other hand the National Maritime Museum and the Thackray Museum, respectively. Great, internationally acknowledged institutions, no doubt about that. But what wonders me is that the project descriptions are so detailed in advance.

For example, the project with the Thackray Museum is called “Industrial Illness in Cultural History: ‘La Maladie du Bradford’ in Local, National and Global Contexts (1875-1919), and the student is supposed to

investigate the impact of woolsorters’ disease or anthrax (as it later came to be known) on the Bradford community where the disease was first identified in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a range of archival and material resources at the Thackray and elsewhere, the project will also seek to assess the development of national legislation in response to the disease; place the disease in a global cultural context, especially that of the British Empire and Continental Europe; and map the interplay between the disease’s local, national and global contexts

(The museum connection is that the student “is expected to create a virtual exhibit of project-related materials and also to contribute to local, national and international meetings”).

That’s a pretty precise project description! (Note: 1875-1919, not even 1920!) But is this a good idea? (It’s not a rhetorical question, I’m really unsure about this.)

Several of my colleagues here in Denmark have rather negative experiences from too pre-specified projects. Students who don’t formulate their own projects tend to drop out, my colleagues say, because they realise after a year or two that they aren’t really motivated.

This has been my intuition too. All my PhD-students have crafted their own projects, and they are now wonderfully independent scholars and professionals—which sort of speaks against pre-specified projects. But is their independence attributable to the fact that they followed their own vision? The negative side of the independently formulated project coin is that such projects are usually delayed — only two of my PhD students completed their projects in time; the others spent one, or two, or even three extra years. And then again, all these theses were great, almost all are either published or submitted for publication. So there may be pros and cons.

Leeds seems to have positive experiences with pre-specified projects, however, since this is the third collaborative doctoral project between the Leeds HPS division and the Thackray Museum. And I’ve heard about other predetermined projects in our field. In fact, it looks like it has become more common in the last decade or so.

Do other institutions have any experiences with this? Any opinions out there?

On Tuesday I am going to give the introductory talk to a ‘meet-the-author’ discussion session at the Swedish History of Science and Technology Biannual Meeting in Stockholm, 8-10 April. (added 9 April: and again at the Dept of Science Studies, Univ of Århus, on Monday 14 April).

My intro talk for the session—titled ‘The Historianimation of Contemporary Technomedicoscience (NewGoogleWorldStudiesTube, 2017)’ and moderated by Sven Widmalm, University of Linköping—will be followed by critical remarks from a discussion panel of historians of science and technology: Jenny Beckman (Stockholm Resilience Centre), Mats Fridlund (Aarhus University), and Christer Nordlund (Umeå University). Here’s a summary of what I’m going to say (earlier Swedish version here):

I have edited two volumes on the historiography of contemporary science, technology and medicine. First The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology which came on Harwood Press in 1997 (see one of many reviews here) and then The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology and Medicine: Writing Recent Science which I edited with Ron Doel on Routledge in 2006 (see book website here).

And now I’m planning the third, and hopefully the last, edited volume on the topic—to be published in 2017.

Well aware of the fact that there may not be any publishers, as we use to know them, in 2017, I’ve nevertheless already begun to think about the proposal; it’s always a good idea to be planning ahead of time.

The volume (I sometimes call it ’contribution’, because the notion of ’book’ may well be obsolete at that time) is at the moment planned to be divided into three parts: 1) The subject matter of the history; 2) The historiographical approach; and 3) The presentation of the past.

As you may well understand, all three parts will put heavy demand on my imagination. So I’m in dire need for some help from the panel and the audience to answer the following three questions—or maybe even pose better questions:

1) What will the subject matter of such a volume be in 2017?

All rendering (I prefer ’render’ to ’write’, cf. below) of the past is bound to be made from the vantage point of the present, so the planned contribution will have to be produced, more or less explicitly, from the horizon of 2017. But what will the institutions of science, technology and medicine be like in 2017? Which sciences and technologies and practices will set the horizon for historicized histories (if we are still interested in historicized history, cf. below).

Will the ‘technoscience’ concept still be useful? Have science and technology merged with design? Will we write from the horizon of a merger between science and religion, or, in other words, is religion on its way back to set scientific agendas?

Or wil we finally have realised that Descartes was right—that science is just a means for cultivating morality and reach the good life (eudaimonia)?—which will then set altogether different agendas for writing the history of the late 20th and early 21st century.

2) How will we approach history in 2017?

Which are the conceptual tools with which we will analyse the history of science, technology and medicine in ten years from now? Theoretical and methodological fashions come and go, and the only safe prognosis one can probably make is that what is modern today is unmodern then. In 2017 we have hopefully forgotten everything about discourse theory, social constructivism, actor network theory, gender theory, and so forth. (Maybe some 2017 history students will reintroduce a then forgotten French essayist by the name of M. Foucault?).

What will come instead? Will evolutionary history (not history of evolution, but history informed by evolutionary theory, like evolutionary psychology) be the Big Thing in 2017? Maybe Whig history will make a successful comeback?

Or maybe we will realise that Carlyle was right after all, i.e., that all history is in essence biography (and autobiography?).

3) How will we render the past?

One of the consequences of the breakthrough of the new visual and internet-based media may be that the rendering of science, technology and medicine of the past is not necessarily identical with ‘writing’ history—or that history will be ‘written’ in article or book format. Will leading historians of science, technology and medicine publish in visual media rather than in written media?

And what will be the effects of the participatory web? Will the rapid emergence of web 2.0-media like Wikipedia, blogs, Youtube etc. (and their 4.0/5.0-successors in 2017) revolutionise the whole publication institution, effectively abolishing peer-review and classical publishing houses?

Or will we be so tired of the post-googlified, globalised internet world that we, as intellectuals, withdraw to the classical learned leatherbound book instead?

I wrote last week about the 3rd annual UK conference on ‘Science and the Public’ to be held in Manchester, 21-22 June. I thought I had missed the dead-line, but it turned out they had extended it, so I sent in an abstract—and to my pleasure it’s just been accepted by the program committee. Here you are:

Science blogging, singularities, and the multitude of technoscience

Within the last couple of years, blogging has emerged as a new genre for STM communication. The number of medical blogs and science blogs is growing exponentially, and famous science blogs like The Daily Transcript, In the Pipeline, MedGadgets, and Partial Immobilizaton have tens of thousands of readers each week. How can the rise of science blogging as an alternative form of science com-munication be understood? Is it best understood in terms of ’science’ and ‘the public’, or does the science blogging phenomenon suggest other, more critically based, dichotomies? In this paper I will argue that science blogging is better understood in terms of Michael Hardt’s and Tony Negri’s conceptualisation of globalisation in terms of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’. Science is financed and managed by a network of national and transnational state organisations and corporations, while the overwhelming number of laboratory and field workers constitute a global knowledge proletariat. These different positions in the global technoscientific field entail two different domains of communication practices which correspond, roughly, to the cultures of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’, respectively. Blogs can thus be intepreted as ’singularities’: there are few group blogs, and even fewer corporate, organisational or national blogs. The large majority of blogs don’t represent any movements, parties, institutions or organisations; instead they function, in a Deleuzian sense, as ”an escape from the dominant codes and majoritarian categories—including those of ‘identity politics’—that otherwise trap the singular in passive or static relations” (Tormey, 2006). Yet blogs are not individualistic in a traditional way: many bloggers identify themselves by pseudonyms. Nor are they solipsistic: there is a high degree of cross-linking between blogs. Furthermore the current dominant mode of thinking among bloggers is (at least now) one of criticism and resistance.