Contemporary geographies and their histories are connected to debates around immigration that are ingrained in the ethnonationalist views of racial difference and purity. From apartheid walls, isolated ghettos, enclosed reservations, to the sinking bodies of dead immigrants in the Mediterranean, the violence of geography allows scholars to examine the relationship between space, place, and race in histories of marginalization and colonialism. In this context, histories of science, traditionally drawn on Eurocentric geographic imagination, contribute to the valuation of certain geographical arrangements that reify racist and isolationist discourses. These geographies act to produce archives of embodied knowledge and condition worthy investigations that tend to erase certain actors and their histories, from Native populations to racially isolated ghettos, in the process of solidifying a historiographic narrative. In “Geographies,” we explore how the history of science relies on and foregrounds specific geographies of knowledge that privilege Euro-American actors and narratives. We investigate how our historiographies engage with these contested spaces, influence the uptake and production of these geographies, and reinforce the narratives of worth that are entangled with these spaces. Moving beyond the local vs global dualism, we explore the intellectual infrastructures that allow for writing histories that contest traditional geographic arrangement of knowledge-making. Through this process, we investigate how global narratives can perpetuate Eurocentricism, and how the entanglement of the discipline with colonial history influences the questions we ask. This is one of two roundtables addressing questions of colonialism, race, gender and sexuality in the production and dissemination of histories of science.
