CfP: Leviathan and after – a celebration of the history of science, the field, and its future

On Monday 12 May 2025, University College London’s Department of Science and Technology Studies and the Science Museum, London, will mark the 40th anniversary of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's field-changing Leviathan and the Air Pump with a landmark celebration of history of science, the field, and its future.

Keynote: Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in conversation with John Tresch at the Science Museum, London.

Forty years ago, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air Pump approached ranges of scientific methods as integrated within contrasting patterns of behaviour and ways of life. Their suggestion was that solutions to the problems of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order. That suggestion becomes ever more significant in periods of dramatic social and political transformations and of shifting models and standards of knowledge. Four decades after the appearance of that book, we invite up and coming researchers to consider how the relations between changing social orders and solutions to problems of knowledge figure in the concerns of their own work today. Continuing the approach demonstrated by Shapin and Schaffer, abstracts will be selected for their methodological intervention and innovation; and for their choice of research topics that challenge the established cultural boundaries of science. Successful applicants will have the opportunity to present at this landmark celebration of the field and its future, to be held at the Science Museum, London.

Bulstrode, JennyFor the opportunity to present at this celebration and have Professors Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer respond to their work in conversation with Professor John Tresch, early career scholars are invited to send abstracts of max. 200 words for 20 minute papers to Jeeny Bulstrode by 15 January 2025.