Historiography Aspen, Second Floor Roundtable
03 Nov 2018 01:30 PM - 03:45 PM(America/Vancouver)
20181103T1330 20181103T1545 America/Vancouver Black/Brown/Queer: Geographies and Temporalities of the History of Science

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.   

Co-organized by Ahmed Ragab (Harvard University) and Shireen Hamza (Harvard University, History of Sci ...

Aspen, Second Floor History of Science Society 2018 meeting@hssonline.org
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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.   

Co-organized by Ahmed Ragab (Harvard University) and Shireen Hamza (Harvard University, History of Science)

Black/Brown/Queer II: Geographies of the History of ScienceView Abstract
RoundtableHistoriography 01:30 PM - 03:45 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 20:30:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 22:45:00 UTC
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.

Presenters
SH
Shireen Hamza
Harvard University, History Of Science
SR
Sophia Roosth
Harvard University
ES
Ezelle Sanford III
Princeton University
EN
Eli Nelson
Williams College
AR
Ahmed Ragab
Harvard University
CN
Carla Nappi
University Of Pittsburgh
Harvard University
University of Pittsburgh
Williams College
Harvard University
Princeton University
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Harvard University
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