CfP “Academic Authority and the Politics of Science and History in Eastern Europe” Workshop
CfP “Academic Authority and the Politics of Science and History in Eastern Europe”
Workshop, March 21-22, 2020 (GWZO Leipzig, Germany)
The scholar is
dead – long live the scholar? Over the last couple of decades, the
epistemological tectonics of contemporary societies have experienced massive
changes – and so has the subject of our workshop, the scholar. Within a highly
diverse environment, scholarship has become destabilised as an epistemic
authority, due to socio-political processes, economic pressure, internal
conflicts, new media techniques etc.
The workshop aims
to investigate the historical changes and challenges of (academic)
scholarship’s role as the paramount producer of knowledge. Concentrating on
(the public perception of) STS scholars, historians, sociologists and
philosophers of science, as well as their non-academic counterparts, we aim to
analyse concepts of scientific self-reflection and their historical trajectory
in Eastern and Central Europe from the 1970s (starting with the Helsinki
Declaration) via the transformations of 1989 and the ‘science wars’ of the
1990s up to the alleged rising of the ‘post-truth era’ today. Looking at the
immanent or perceived boundaries between different rationalities, between
science, politics, and the public, we will map changes in the political
configuration of knowledge production by discussing if, when and how these
boundaries shifted, were strengthened, weakened or removed and how this
affected the epistemic figure of the scholar. We will look at epistemological
dynamics between universalism and particularism, the fragmentation of epistemic
authority, and the tribalisation of truth, and want to discuss whether they can
be regarded as an effect of
…political
transformations, processes of re-nationalization, conservative and religious
turns,
…a shift in media
technologies and the unsettling of classic information media,
…social
diversification and the consequent emergence of specific group attitudes
towards globalization or modernization.
We will, however,
ask as well, whether the observable loss of scholarship’s authority has to be
regarded as a new phenomenon, or whether this diagnosis itself follows a
narrative of decay? Did scholars in Eastern Europe possess an epistemological
hegemony at all and if so – how can it be characterized? Can we consider the
present state as a slightly more splintered version of conflicts well known
from the Cold War and the ‘science wars’, or do we have to take into account a
vast variety of different former epistemological camps in the East? What is the
relationship between ‘traditional’ modes of propaganda or disinformation and
postmodern relativist philosophies? Do politicized epistemologies have to be
regarded as a new phenomenon, informed by these philosophies and generated by
the emergence of new technical media?
Tackling these
issues, we hope to shed light not only on some crucial developments in the
Central and Eastern European history of science and humanities itself, but on
some of the most pressing and far-reaching questions about the contemporary
status of academia.
Papers should
address one of the three areas:
(1.) epistemology
as a factor of system stabilization and the belief in the objective and
trustworthy scientific persona, whose diagnoses and prognoses are of paramount
importance for the society / the state, as epitomized in the Science of Science
scholar up to 1989;
(2.) the
unbalancing of professional/academic and lay/dissident epistemologies, the
post-soviet transformation of the figure of the scholar, and the rewriting of
its history in the history of science during the 1990s;
(3.) the
increasing emergence and approval of non-academic producers of knowledge, and
the related transformation of scholarly self-conception and master narratives
in the field of history (of science and humanities) from the 1990s until today,
when the academic scholar has lost more and more ground as a figure of trust.
The workshop continues
a series of events held at Erfurt (2017, 2018), Moscow (2018), and St.
Petersburg (2019) in the context of the research initiative (East) European
Epistemologies. The upcoming meeting will be organised at the Leibniz Institute
for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in Leipzig by
Friedrich Cain (Max Weber Kolleg / University of Erfurt),
Dietlind Hüchtker (GWZO),
Bernhard Kleeberg (Max Weber Kolleg / University of Erfurt),
Karin Reichenbach (University of Leipzig), and
Jan Surman (IGITI, Higher School of Economics Moscow).
Travelling costs and accommodation will be covered in
accordance with the travel regulations of Saxony. Please, direct proposals
(<500 words) for papers (~ 20 min) and a short cv by December 13, 2019. We especially welcome proposals by PhD students.