Sam Ducourant

Sam Ducourant is a visiting predoctoral fellow in the Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences Research Group at the MPIWG, led by Lara Keuck, as well as a visiting fellow at the Maison Française d'Oxford. Sam is currently carrying out their PhD in cooperation with École Normale Supérieure de Paris (ENS, France), and their work focuses on the History and Philosophy of Animal Welfare Sciences in twentieth-century Western Europe and the USA. They study the relationships between scientific discipline construction and political debates around the use of farm animals. They arrived in the Max Planck Research Group as a DAAD-funded fellow (2021–22), and their current research project deals with concept transfers between biomedical sciences, that is, how disciplines share, exchange, and negotiate concepts—and their validity—in order to build and solidify their identities.

Sam received an MA in History of Philosophy at ENS and Paris Sorbonne University, and an MA in History and Philosophy of Science at ENS and Paris Diderot University. In 2017–18, they were a visiting fellow at Université de Montréal and started a French translation of Georg Ernst Stahl’s Theoria Medica Vera (1708). During their first four PhD years (2018–22), Sam also taught general philosophy, history, and philosophy of sciences, and supervised research projects at Université Paris Sciences et Lettres and AgroParisTech.