Call for participants: Sabers en construcció / Knowledge (s) in construction

Sabers en construcció / Knowledge (s) in construction

First King’s College-CHoSTM and Interuniversity Institute López Piñero encounter around Sabers en acción

Valencia, April 4, 2025, Palau de Cerveró. Plaça Cisneros, 4 (Valencia)

Live streaming: https://uv-es.zoom.us/j/95620404575

Call for participants

On April 4 2025, the López Piñero Interuniversity Institute will organize a meeting with professors and researchers from the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at King's College London to discuss their contributions to a new section and several entries in Saberes en Acción. It is an opportunity to discuss the topics addressed, all of which based on ongoing research projects, but also to discuss their form and function as part of a didactic and popularization tool like Saberes en acción, conceived as a multilingual, online and open access textbook based on the latest perspectives and research findings in history of science, medicine and technology.

We address our warmest invitation to all students of master's and doctoral programs in history of science and scientific documentation, as well as teachers of these areas of knowledge and, of course, all those interested in meeting and discussing closely with the invited speakers.

You can attend in person at the headquarters of the Instituto Interuniversitario López Piñero in Valencia or follow it online through these links. Speakers will briefly (5 minutes) introduce their pre-circulated text, before opening the discussion (up to half an hour). If you are interested in having access to the texts in advance, please send your request to Antonio García Belmar (belmar@ua.es), before March 30.

 

Programme

Thursday, 3

18:00  Welcome to the Instituto López Piñero and visit to the library, archive and permanent and temporary exhibitions. Ximo Guillén, Josep Simón and Antonio García Belmar.

 

Fryday, 4

09:00  Welcoming. Antonio García Belmar

09:30  Introducing Sabers en acció. José Ramón Bertomeu

10:00  The Global History of Science and Technology: is our problem lack of knowledge or what we know? David Edgerton

There is a long tradition in the historiography of science and technology and indeed STS of complaining that we know little about the relations of knowledge, technical practices and society. Indeed Bruno Latour has suggested that such ignorance is, in modernity, a structural feature which made possible the transformations human knowledge remains unable to grasp. There is much of interest in such a thesis, but too often it is wrongly interpreted to mean that the problem we have is ignorance, rather than what we believe we know. In response to such a position the injunction is to write histories, following the scientists, ignoring existing stories, which if considered at all are dismissed as technologically determinist or diffusionist or some such. The irony is that the histories which result are not fresh, but are often technologically determinist or diffusionist!

We need a better way of thinking about and rewriting the global history of science and technology. It will require understanding what we take to be our knowledge actually is. That requires understanding of academic literatures outside the history of science and technology, and also popular understandings over time. For to avoid repeating misunderstandings we need to understand the misunderstanding. These are not primarily theoretical but empirical. Most supposedly technologically determinist arguments fail not because they are technologically determinist but because they get the determining technology and the effect wrong. We need in other words to understand the substantive claims made and whether they stand up.

What kinds of claims are made about the global history of science and technology in the twentieth century? There are for example claims made about successive scientific, technological and industrial revolutions. For historians these have congealed into the belief that there was a foundational Second Industrial Revolution at the end of the nineteenth century. Many have come to believe we have a good account of the sciences and technologies of North America or Europe, but that this Eurocentric understanding does not apply elsewhere. But, is our account of the Eurocentre in fact adequate? Related is the argument that in imperial contexts the dynamics of science and technology are different from those in the metropole.

I will explore these and other ideas, and suggest new ways forward (as illustrated by my colleagues).

10:30 Caffe

11:00 A history of agricultural techniques in the twentieth century: With some illustrations from India and the United States. Shankar Nair

Agriculture informs our understanding of the modern twentieth century. Whether in its absence (a transition out of agriculture), transformation (the industrialisation of agriculture), or persistence (the stagnation of agriculture), agriculture provides the foundation of our stories of technological, scientific, and industrial modernity widely shared by scholars and the public. Yet, with few exceptions, the very techniques and social relationships that underpin vastly different agrarian societies and their modernisation (or lack thereof) has eluded any systematic global comparisons. Instead, we have the above-mentioned long-held models about different national economies, or different political geographies (the centre and the periphery, the West vs. the Rest) that define our histories of agriculture and technology. This paper examines the basis of these clichés through an analysis of a selection of agricultural farm and processing techniques in India, the typical laggard in stories of agricultural modernity, and the United States, its exemplar. It shows that our comparisons are neither robust, nor the explanations given for their difference, adequate. Indeed, agricultural economists, students of technology transfer, and a few social scientists have been alive to the uneven and therefore plural nature of agricultural techniques and systems, but these accounts have hardly informed wider debates. The paper argues that we need a better informed global and material picture of modern agriculture to overcome these dominant models of modernity.

11:30  The development of new media and modern communications systems. Francisca Valenzuela Villaseca

How (if, and where) has new media shaped new cultures of communication in the nineteenth and twentieth century. This contribution surveys the history of a few means of communication from the perspective of use. On the one hand, some histories of new media are often concerned with the invention and innovation of communications systems to stress technological development, rather than the study a specific technique in its own time, place and terms. Such an account suggests that a supersession of new techniques has led to our present-day media (from the printing press to the Internet), and often construct a narrative based on the analysis of few exceptional cases that do not stand for the whole. For example, we are commonly told that the globalisation facilitated by the telegraph was a precedent to the “global village” and the Internet and forewarned that the digital age will inevitably lead to the disappearance of printed books. Promoters have had an important influence in this; when telephony (“the talking telegraph”) was invented, it was envisioned that they would replace telegraphs. Instead, this contribution will look at cases of new media and means of communications in the nineteenth and twentieth century to analyse (rather than assume) the extent to which these media changed cultures of communications, to distinguish exceptional trajectories from a broader story, through a survey of those cases in rich and poor countries. Drawing on a corpus of recent historiography that has productively turn to the study of media vis-a-vis its material context and in consideration of its users. It contextualises their relation to the state, imperialism, war, and economic development. (Cases will likely be telegraphy, mail and cell phones.)

12: 00 Caffe

12:30  Strains of a Scientific Breakthrough: Bacteriology and Adoption of Water Filtration in early 20th century India. Viswanathan Venkataraman

This presentation provides an instance of how bacteriological ideas were received in India, by examining the debates and controversies around adoption of water filtration technologies in a large Indian city. While conventional literature seems to paint disputes about water purity in India (and in the extra-European world more generally) as a contestation between secular and religious/spiritual ideas around water, this work shows that the controversies had their root in the unstable technological and scientific landscape that marked the emergence of germ theory of disease causation. In the Indian context, while the fundamental insight of the germ theory had gained greater official recognition by the early years of the 20 th century, there was very little empirical guidance available to local actors on how to translate this insight to the purification of water. In the Indian context, cities initially attempted to replicate the British experience by adopting the same filtration technologies. This proved inadequate, requiring years of experimentation, debate and inquiry among experts geared towards identifying most suitable methods to translate bacteriological ideas into practise. While experts identified suitable methods by the 1920s, getting municipal leaders to pay for the requisite changes proved difficult, a sign of the state of municipal finance on the one hand and of the difficulty of making them trust expert views after years of dissensions and disagreement on the other. Through this exploration, this presentation makes a case for the mutual interconnection between the epistemological and the economic spheres involved when supposed scientific breakthroughs must be translated into practice.

13:00  Chlorination: the history of a global technology. Edisson Aguilar Torres

Chlorination, the use of chlorine as a means of water disinfection, was tried from the late 19 th century in England, Germany and to some extent the United States, mainly on sewage. In the few cases in which it was used to treat drinking water, it was on an experimental basis, and to deal with emergencies, such as typhoid fever outbreaks. Doctors, sanitary engineers and citizens alike distrusted chlorine as a permanent water treatment and only deemed ozone a safe and effective, although expensive option for chemical disinfection. However, by 1930, chlorination had spread at an incredible speed in poor and rich countries, with lasting consequences for human health, reducing mortality and morbidity worldwide. How can we account for this? I will show that chlorination in Jersey City, London and Bogotá (but basically everywhere) was adopted for economic reasons, following debates that were, in essence, the same everywhere. The low cost and easy applicability of chlorine made it a suitable technology in the face of economic troubles of different kinds and led to its standardisation in water treatment globally. Through this approach, I will make evident the importance of imitation as a driving force of technical change and argue for the relevance of analysing similarities and differences in the adoption of technology based on available evidence rather than in the assumption that different contexts necessarily follow different logics when deciding on the adoption of technologies.

13:30  Lunch

16:30  The origins of the modern morgue. Catriona Byers

When we think of morgues today, we imagine discreet, medical spaces; waiting rooms between the worlds of the living and the dead. But the first ever modern morgue, established in Paris in the early nineteenth century, had multiple functions ranging from exhibiting unclaimed bodies for identification to advancing anatomical study, forensic science, and criminology.

 

The Paris morgue opened in 1804, largely in response to swift demographic growth, changing approaches to medicine and the medico-legal field following the French Revolution, and a growing state and police interest in having all citizens accounted for. Overseen by the Prefecture of Police and ostensibly designed to process and manage the unclaimed dead found in the river and the streets, it developed into a world-famous site - a hub for scientific and medico-legal advances, and an incredibly popular attraction that brought in over one million visitors per year by the end of the period, eager to see the dead on display.

 

Crucially, the combined popular and professional interest in this unassuming Parisian building quickly transformed it into a model example that could be followed: a key municipal institution operating within the complex and overlapping medical, judicial and carceral networks of the nineteenth-century city. As a result, it became the blueprint for urban morgues internationally, leading to the establishment of new institutions in cities around the world including New York, Melbourne, Lisbon, Bucharest, and Berlin, that subsequently influenced the development of medicine and policing in their own countries. 

17:00  The History of Intelligence Science. David Brydan

 

Intelligence is a relatively modern invention. The way we understand it today is in large part a product of the Enlightenment, shaped by debates about the natural world, about race, and about individual differences. These ideas about intelligence were transformed into a science at the turn of the 20 th century when they became incorporated in the emerging field of experimental psychology. This science, in turn, helped to produce a suite of testing technologies which became embedded in everyday life in the early 20 th century and were, to a certain extent at least, globalised. The history of intelligence science across the 20 th century has been shaped by two key debates, both deeply controversial. The first was the question of nature vs. nurture; whether differences in intelligence were principally determined by hereditary or environmental factor. The second was the related question of racial differences in intelligences, which was integral to early intelligence science and continued to dog the field until the end of the 20 th century. These controversies have left intelligence science in a deeply ambiguous position in the early 21 st century. To some extent it has become marginalized and discredited, no longer a mainstream field of study in psychology and often regarded as the preserve of cranks and pseudo-racists. But on the other hand, the notion of intelligence and the tools of intelligence testing continue to be used, often uncritically, in fields such as genetics, neuroscience and even AI. 

17:30  “A History of Health Scepticism: From “Healthy” Activism to Divisive Misinformation.” Caitjan Gainty 

This essay describes the late 20^th century history of health scepticism, charting it from its position in current discourse as a bedfellow to misinformation to the position it has held in past, as an important and productive avenue for the constructive critique and reform of medicine and public health. The essay begins at mid-century, charting a high point of health scepticism of the 1970s, when it merged with/re-emerged out of the protest and rights movements of the period, before taking the story forward to contemplate why this most pronounced version of health scepticism “went” and why its current form is so reduced. It finally considers example of how – via the disaggregation of health sceptics – we might be able to discern important points of critique and reform relevant to our own moment.   

18:00  Caffe

18:30  Concluding remarks and next step tasks. David, Edgerton, José Ramón Bertomeu & Antonio García Belmar.

21:00  Diner