The material culture of scientific and technical practices and questions about the location of material agency in and beyond laboratories represent some of the ongoing investigative foci in the history of science that define the fronts of scholarly debate and thought. In this roundtable conversation, we examine the extent to which materiality functions as a methodology for reconstructing historical developments that seem to have, on the surface, nothing to do with the material thing itself. Whether the gaze rests upon global life cycles of living and nonliving entities, organismal life cycles, embodiments, or other processes, common threads about the relationship between local knowledge production and universal phenomena run across different scales of concern and draw crucial attention to productive tensions that deserve further comparative analysis.

Chair: Mats Fridlund