Roundtable discussion with Amy Slaton (Drexel University), Tiago Saraiva (Drexel University), Kärin Nickelsen (LMU München), chaired by Thomas Turnbull (MPIWG)

Journal editors have long been the arbiters who ultimately decide what kinds of knowledge enter into both the academic record and the public sphere. In recent years, as journals have migrated online and barriers to access have been lowered via legal and extra-legal means of open access, our discipline’s knowledge has at times been drawn in to a wider and ongoing ‘culture war’ in new and complex ways. While the history of science has never stood outside of wider cultural concerns, a new set of concepts has been developed both within and beyond the discipline as a means of categorising, valorising, or condemning knowledge. From ‘fake news’ to ‘junk science’, to ‘activist scholarship’ and the supposed discipline of ‘grievance studies’, we are told of how new and purportedly invalid forms of knowledge are appearing en masse. Mendacious and profit-seeking ‘paper mills’ flood ‘pay to play’ journals with articles written in ‘tortured phrases’ by AI-exploiting ‘prompt engineers’, while shared access to underlying data has led to claims of a ‘reproducibility crisis’ in sciences both natural and human. New knowledge is being categorized as invalid for a variety of reasons.

Historians of knowledge cannot stand outside of this epistemological turmoil. There is no such non-political place. Instead, given long-held concerns with epistemology and politics of knowledge, we should assume a vocal and central position. In this event in the 2024-2025 Institute’s Colloquium series,  three leading editors of history of science and technology journals in the English- and German-speaking worlds will provide a short overview of the changing nature of their editorial work, their respective specializations, and recent controversies that have erupted as our disciplinary methods, obligations, and scholarly practices have been targeted by critics from both within and beyond the normal confines of scholarly communication and critique.

Amy E. Slaton is a professor emerita in the Department of History at Drexel University. She holds a PhD in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Prof. Slaton’s research has centered on the social character of technoscientific expertise and work. Her book, Reinforced Concrete and the Modernization of American Building, 1900-1930 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), integrated the histories of materials testing, construction labor, building codes and standards, and aesthetic change surrounding the introduction of commercial reinforced concrete in the United States. Further work on materiality, labor, and historical formulations of human difference can be found in her edited volume, New Materials: Towards a History of Consistency (Lever Press, 2020). Slaton is also interested in recent understandings of technical aptitude in engineering education under capitalism more generally, with particular emphasis on the insistent role of race, gender, disability and queer identifications. She is the author of Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering: The History of an Occupational Color Line (Harvard University Press, 2010). Her current book project is All Good People: Difference, Diversity and The Invention of Opportunity.  She is co-editor, with Tiago Saraiva, of the journal, History+Technology.

Tiago Saraiva is Full Professor of History at Drexel University, coeditor of the journal History and Technology, and author of Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (MIT Press, 2016), which was awarded the Pfizer Prize for best scholarly book by the History of Science Society in 2017, and co-author of Moving Crops and the Scales of History (Yale University Press, 2023), also awarded best book in 2024 by the Society for the History of Technology and the World History Association. He is a historian of science and technology interested in the connections between science, technology, crops, and politics at the global scale. After revisiting the history of European fascism through stories of technoscientific organisms such as wheat, pigs, and sheep, he is now studying the significance of cloning Californian oranges for the history of whiteness in the United States, South Africa, Algeria, Palestine, and Brazil. Tiago Saraiva is the co-editor of Nature Remade (University of Chicago Press, 2021) and Capital Científica (Imprensa Ciências Sociais, 2019), as well as co-author of Inventing a European Nation (Springer, 2021). He is currently coediting the three volumes of the Cambridge History of Technology to be published in 2026.

Kärin Nickelsen is Professor in History of Science at Ludwig Maximilians University Munich. She has published widely on the history of biological sciences, especially botany and plant physiology in the modern period (18th-20th cent.), with particular interest in questions of historical epistemology and methodology, the history of collective research heuristics, and practices of collaboration and competition within and across disciplinary boundaries. Her books include Draughtsmen, Botanists, and Nature (2006), Explaining Photosynthesis (2015), and Far Beyond the Moon (2021). Her work has received international awards, she is member of various scholarly academies, including the Leopoldina and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and she is President-Elect of the European Society for the History of Science. Since 2017, Kärin Nickelsen is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte – History of Science and Humanities.

Moderator
Thomas Turnbull