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Histories of science are traditionally plotted on chronologies that explain the rise of modern European science. These chronologies, even when globalized, have foregrounded the privileging of European history and provided justificatory narratives for colonial expansion and for European and white superamcy. Even as these narratives continue to be questioned, they remain entrenched in the public imagination. The temporality question in writing the history of science is not only related to a teleology of modern European science but also to the study of the contemporary and the future. How will the future of science be produced, and who is able to bring it about? The necessary selectivity of historiographic narratives relies on presumptions of chronological neutrality, only these narratives still perpetuate and further entrench these chronologies. At another level, the Euroamerican origins of the discipline foreground a particular mode of history writing that privileges linearity and endows certain historiographic methods with the power of scientific authority. In “Temporalities,” we inquire and challenge the kinds of chronologies that foreground our discipline. We discuss how certain chronological arrangements come to govern the adjudication of epistemic worth and the production of science-history. We also investigate the hegemony of chronological arrangements that privilege particular modes of history-making, while neglecting and marginalizing other narratives and the communities that produce them. This is one of two roundtables addressing questions of colonialism, race, gender and sexuality in the production and dissemination of histories of science.
