CfP: ESHS/BSHS 2018: Little science
Symposium proposal, ESHS and BSHS meeting, London September 2018 http://eshs2018.uk
Little science
Compared to all that we know about Big Science, little is known about
little science. The concept itself lacks a proper definition: what does
“little” stand for? Inexpensive? Of scarce interest to the media? Little
or slow? Little science risks being conceived
of as the negative counterpart, the obsolete precursor, or the
poor sister of Big Science, a scientific practice on its way to
extinction.
The symposium will challenge these meanings and explore ways to think
about little science on its own. For the sake of clarity, little science
will be provisionally defined as a contemporary knowledge-making
practice performed by small teams of researchers
that know each other and acknowledge that personal relations are
central to research; as a practice that does not necessarily
entail transnational cooperation and certainly does not depend on
multi-million budgets; as a practice that may focus on what appears
to be well-trodden paths with little promise... But crucially
and paradoxically, too, as a practice that is disproportionally relevant
and disruptive, and contributes to a great extent to produce
new knowledge.
The Superconductivity Group at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
provides an example. Consisting of seven members, combining theoretical
and experimental physicists, and building prototypes from scratch in a
tiny lab, its research on magnetic cloaks and
wormholes was published in leading journals and featured in
international news agencies. How does this fit with prevailing images of
contemporary scientific practice? How does it relate to a broader
argument about the long march of professionalization and
the corresponding increase in size of the scientific enterprise?
The symposium will therefore dwell on the theme of unity and disunity in
the sciences by looking at the relation between scale and relevance,
broadly conceived. Papers are invited dealing with these themes, either
as case studies or as reflexions on the pervasiveness,
historical resilience, contemporary relevance, and
the historiographical and political meaning of small-scale research.
Send expressions of interest or paper proposals before 13 December to Xavier Roqué
xavier.roque@uab.cat