Knowledge in a Box

Call For Papers

                                   
                          Knowledge in a Box:

             How Mundane Things Shape Knowledge Production

 

 Organizing committee:

 

 Susanne Bauer, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science,
 Berlin, Germany

 Maria Rentetzi, National Technical University of Athens, Athens,
 Greece

 Martina Schlünder, Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen, Germany

 

 The topic:

 

 We invite proposals from scholars in the history of science,
 technology, and medicine, science and technology studies, the
 humanities, visual and performing arts, museum and cultural studies
 and other related disciplines for a workshop on the uses and meanings
 of mundane things such as boxes, packages, bottles, and vials in
 shaping knowledge production. In keeping with the conference theme, we
 are asking contributors to include specific references to the ways in
 which boxes have played a role—commercial, epistemic or otherwise—in
 their own particular disciplinary frameworks.

 

 

 Boxes have always supported the significance of the objects they
 contained, allowing specific activities to arise.  In the hands of
 natural historians and collectors, boxes functioned as a means of
 organizing their knowledge throughout the eighteenth century. They
 formed the material bases of the cabinet or established collection and
 accompanied the collector from the initial gathering of natural
 specimens to their final display. As “knowledge chests” or “magazining
 tools” the history of box-like containers also go back to book
 printing and the typographical culture. The artists’ boxes of the
 early nineteenth century were used to store the paraphernalia of a new
 fashionable trend. In the late nineteenth century the box became the
 pharmacist’s laboratory and a device for standardizing and controlling
 dosage of oral remedies. In the twentieth century radiotherapy the box
 was elevated to a multifunctional tool working as a memory aid to
 forgetful patients or as “knowledge package” that predetermined
 dosages, included equipment, and ready-made radium applicators.

 

 Focusing on medicine, boxes have played a crucial role since the
 eighteenth century when doctors ought to bring instruments to their
 patient’s house for surgical or obstetrical interventions. In modern
 operating rooms boxes organize the workflow and build an essential
 part of the aseptical regime. Late twentieth century biomedical
 scientists store tissue samples in large-scale biobanks, where samples
 contained in straws are placed in vials, then the vials in boxes which
 in turn are stacked up in "elevators". This storage system facilitates
 retrieval with barcodes, indexing each individual sample so that
 additional variables can be retrieved from a database. Thus the
 container and its content are tied up in a close epistemic and
 material relationship.

 As it is usually the case the box embodies the knowledge that goes
 into the chemical laboratory and its function; it classifies objects
 into collections of natural history; it meaningfully orders letters in
 a printer’s composition or painting equipment for the artist’
 convenience; it standardizes pharmaceutical dosage forms and allows
 pharmacists to control the production and consumption of their
 remedies; in the commercial world it misleads or informs customers; it
 persuades consumers for the integrity of the product that they
 enclose; it hides the identity of the object(s) that contains, it
 shapes professional identities and is essential for mobilizing,
 transporting, accumulating and circulating materials and the knowledge
 they produce and embody.

 

 Furthermore, if we do understand matter and materiality not as  given,
 solid, continuous, and stable but rather as something being  done,
 performed, shaped and embedded in  practices, then we should examine
 closer how bottles and boxes themselves materialize differently in a
 set of diverse practices. How do they change their ontologies by
 migrating from the kitchen to the laboratory, from the workshop to the
 operating room?

 

 We welcome innovative understandings of the role that boxes and
 containers have played historically and continue to play in
 technology, medicine, and science. We see the workshop as contributing
 to an ongoing interest in science and technology studies on the
 importance of mundane things in scientific practice and technological
 innovations.  

 

 Dates:

 July 26-29, 2012

 

 Submission guidelines:

 Deadline for proposals: January 15, 2012

 Please submit a 300-words abstract along with your name, institutional
 affiliation, email and phone number as a word or pdf attachment to the
 organizers of the conference

 

 Proposals will be reviewed and notification of the outcome will be
 made in February 15, 2012. We are pursuing publication outlets for
 selected papers from the workshop. Therefore we expect full papers
 from those that will participate by May 30, 2012. Details will be
 provided after notification.

 

 Conference registration fee: 50 euros

 

 Place:

 The venue of the conference is a wonderful tobacco warehouse renovated
 to host the tobacco museum of the city of Kavala in northern Greece.

 

 Contact info:

 For further information please contact the organizers:


 Maria Rentetzi mrentetz@vt.edu

 Martina Schlünder m.schluender@gmx.de  


 --
 Maria Rentetzi
 Assistant Professor
 National Technical University of Athens Department of Humanities,
 Social Sciences and Law School of Applied Mathematics and Physical
 Sciences Zografou Campus, Zografou 15780 Athens, Greece tel. +30 210
 6106537 , fax +30 210 7721618