Showing papers in "Science in Context in 2019"

Apprenticeship in the Renaissance university: Student authorship and craft knowledge

Abstract: Students entered Renaissance universities as apprentices in the craft of books. In the decades around 1500, such university training began to involve not only manuscript circulation, but also the production and the use of books in the new medium of print. Through their role in the crafting of books, I show how a circle of students around Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples gained the experience needed to become bookmen. Students took classroom manuscripts and brought them into print – the new print shop offered students a place in which to exchange labor for credibility as joint authors.

Mediated education in early modern travel stories: How travel stories contribute to children’s empirical learning

Abstract: Linking up with recent studies on the experience of space and place in modern youth literature, this article analyzes how the “journey” as a narrative line and motif transformed Dutch early modern travel books for children from classical teaching instruments into explorative knowledge places. In the popular seventeenth-century Glorious and Fortunate Journey to the Holy Land, young readers were invited to travel within the book, which was presented as a place that covers material pages to observe as well as imagined places to read about. Eighteenth-century travel books, for example written by Joachim Heinrich Campe, shifted from an inner to an empirical mode of travelling. They raised the suggestion that they offered unmediated observations and travel experiences, as if reading about places was equal to seeing places. Since travel literature facilitated active knowledge quisition among youngsters, but also left little room for autonomous innovations or different interpretations, this article reveals the emancipatory as well as restrictive character of such places of learning. By turning reading into a kind of travelling, travel books served as a substitute for travel.

Six Dimensions of Concentration in Economics: Evidence from a Large-Scale Data Set

Abstract: This paper argues that the economics discipline is highly concentrated, which may inhibit scientific innovation and change in the future. The argument is based on an empirical investigation of six dimensions of concentration in economics between 1956 and 2016 using a large-scale data set. The results show that North America accounts for nearly half of all articles and three quarters of all citations. Twenty institutions reap a share of 42 percent of citations, five journals a share of 28.5 percent, and 100 authors a share of 15.5 percent. A total of 2.8 percent of citations may be attributed to heterodox schools of thought. Also top articles are concentrated along these dimensions. Overall, concentration has strongly increased over the last six decades.

Citation patterns in economics and beyond.

Abstract: In this paper we comparatively explore three claims concerning the disciplinary character of economics by means of citation analysis. The three claims under study are: (1) economics exhibits strong forms of institutional stratification and, as a byproduct, a rather pronounced internal hierarchy; (2) economists strongly conform to institutional incentives; and (3) modern mainstream economics is a largely self-referential intellectual project mostly inaccessible to disciplinary or paradigmatic outsiders. The validity of these claims is assessed by means of an interdisciplinary comparison of citation patterns aiming to identify peculiar characteristics of economic discourse. In doing so, we emphasize that citation data can always be interpreted in different ways, thereby focusing on the contrast between a "cognitive" and an "evaluative" approach towards citation data.

Blood purity and scientific independence: blood science and postcolonial struggles in Korea, 1926-1975.

Abstract: After World War II, blood groups became a symbol of anti-racial science. This paper aims to shed new light on the post-WWII history of blood groups and race, illuminating the postcolonial revitalization of racial serology in South Korea. In the prewar period, Japanese serologists developed a serological anthropology of Koreans in tandem with Japanese colonialism. The pioneering Korean hematologist Yi Samyŏl (1926-2015), inspired by decolonization movements during the 1960s, excavated and appropriated colonial serological anthropology to prove Koreans as biologically independent from the Japanese. However, his racial serology of Koreans shared colonial racism with Japanese anthropology, despite his anti-colonial nationalism.

ARA relief campaign in the Volga region, Jewish anthropometric statistics, and the scientific promise of integration.

Abstract: ArgumentThe article builds a case for the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population (Obshchestvo Okhranenia Zdorov'ia Evreiskogo Naselenia [OZE]) as a project of medicalized modernity, a mass politics of Jewish self-help that relied on a racialized and medicalized vision of a future Jewish nation. Officially registered in 1912 in St. Petersburg, it created the space for a Jewish politics that focused on the state of the collective Jewish body as a precondition for Jewish participation in any version of modernity. OZE futurism survived the years of World War I and the Russian Civil War, when the organization had to concentrate on rescue and relief rather than on facilitating the development of new bodies and souls. New archival evidence reveals how race science, medical statistics, and positive eugenics became composite elements of the Jewish anticolonial message and new subjectivity.

"The disadvantages of a defective education": identity, experiment and persuasion in the natural history of the salmon and parr controversy, c. 1825-1850.

Abstract: During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, an argument raged about the identity of a small freshwater fish: was the parr a distinct species, or merely the young of the salmon? This "Parr Controversy" concerned both fishermen and ichthyologists. A central protagonist in the controversy was a man of ambiguous social and scientific status: a gamekeeper from Scotland named John Shaw. This paper examines Shaw's heterogeneous practices and the reception of his claims by naturalists as he struggled to find a footing on the "gradient of attributed competence" (Rudwick 1985). The case demonstrates the context-specific nature of expert-lay boundaries and identities and explores a range of material and linguistic resources available for negotiating them. Arguing for a view of Shaw's trajectory as simultaneously one of being a "practical man" and of becoming a naturalist, the paper explores both the permeability of social hierarchies in knowledge production and their effective role in the regulation of competency.

Educating physicians in seventeenth-century England

Abstract: The tension between theoretical and practical knowledge was particularly problematic for trainee physicians. Unlike civic apprenticeships in surgery and pharmacy, in early modern England there was no standard procedure for obtaining education in the practical aspects of the physician’s role, a very uncertain process of certification, and little regulation to ensure a suitable reward for their educational investment. For all the emphasis on academic learning and international travel, the majority of provincial physicians returned to practice in their home area, because establishing a practice owed more to networks of kinship, patronage and credit than to formal qualifications. Only when (and where) practitioners had to rely solely on their professional qualification to establish their status as young practitioners that the community could trust would proposals to reform medical education, such as those put forward to address a crisis of medicine in Restoration London, which are examined here, be converted into national regulation of medical education in the early nineteenth century, although these proposals prefigured many informal developments in medical training in the eighteenth century.

Between Apprenticeship and Skill: Acquiring Knowledge outside the Academy in Early Modern England

Abstract: Apprenticeship was probably the largest mode of organized learning in early modern European societies, and artisan practitioners commonly began as apprentices. Yet little is known about how youths actually gained skills. I develop a model of vocational pedagogy that accounts for the characteristics of apprenticeship and use a range of legal and autobiographical sources to examine the contribution of different forms of training in England. Apprenticeship emerges as a relatively narrow channel, in which the master's contribution to training was weakly defined and executed conservatively. The creation of complementary channels of formal instruction was constrained by cost and coordination problems. When we consider a range of British youths who obtained advanced skills as artisan practitioners (and engaged in invention or pursued natural philosophical interests), we see the importance of individual agency over institutional structures. For these youths, training could involve rejecting apprenticeship, engaging in periods of advanced study, including time in multiple workshops after the end of apprenticeship, and parallel campaigns to access scarce books and communities of scholarship.

Eugenics and racial anthropology in the Ukrainian radical nationalist tradition

Abstract: ArgumentEugenics and race played significant roles in Ukrainian interwar nationalism, yet remain largely unstudied. The Ukrainian nationalists' understanding of the racial makeup of their imagined community was contradictory as they struggled to reconcile their desire for racial "purity" with the realities of significant variations between the populations inhabiting the enormous territories which they sought to include in their intended state project. The "turn to the right" over the 1930s placed an increased onus on race, and eugenics came to occupy an increasingly prominent place in Ukrainian radical nationalism from around 1936. In 1941, the leading Ukrainian far-right organization, the OUN had developed a project for eugenic engineering, for their aborted state, declared in L'viv on June 30, 1941. Racial conceptualizations of the Ukrainian community figured prominently well into the Cold War era, gaining a new actuality and meaning in an emigre community dispersed across several countries.

Youthful Minds and Hands : Learning Practical Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Abstract: In Cesare Ripa’s famous and often translated anthology of personifications, Studio (to learn) is described as a young man (un Giouane) in the original Italian edition (see fig. 1, above). In this image from the eighteenth-century English edition, the learning of youths is represented as an activity characterized by solitude: reading a book on one’s own. The cock on the left functions as a symbol for the diligence of such isolated young learners (Ripa 1603; Ripa 1709; Ripa 1971). Ripa’s personification represents youthful learning as quite the opposite of the collective production of knowledge in the laboratory, and the technologies of learning in the workshop or on the shop floor. In the early modern period, the “studio” referred to a place for reading and drawing surrounded by books, spatially removed from the workshop or “laboratory” in which manual work was performed (Dupré 2014). Yet, recent scholarship has shown that practical knowledge – collectively obtained in workshops or laboratories – became increasingly characteristic of the dominant knowledge cultures Figure 1. Ripa, Cesare. 1709. Iconologia, or, Moral Emblems, by Cesare Ripa. London: Benjamin Motte [Utrecht University Special Collections: ICON 166], p. 73.

Epidemiological state-building in interwar Poland: discourses and paper technologies.

Abstract: The paper argues that epidemic surveillance and state-building were closely interconnected in interwar Poland. Starting from the paper technology of weekly epidemiological reporting it discusses how the reporting scheme of Polish epidemics came into being in the context of a typhus epidemic in 1919–20. It then shows how the statistics regarding nation-wide epidemics was put into practice. It is only when we take into account these practices that we can understand the epidemiological order the statistics produced. The preprinted weekly report form registered Jews and Christians separately. Yet, the imagined national epidemiological space that emerged from it hardly took notice of this separation. Rather, the category that differentiated Polish epidemiological space in medical discourse was the capacity of contributing to the state-making practices of epidemic surveillance. This category divided Poland into two regions: a civilized and modern western region and a backward and peripheral eastern region.

The course of professionalization: Jewish nursing in Poland in the interwar period.

Abstract: ArgumentThis paper focuses on the Jewish nursing profession in Poland during the interwar period. We argue that the integration of Jewish women in medical activity under the AJDC (American Jewish Distribution Committee) and TOZ (Towarzystwa Ochrony Zdrowia Ludności Żydowskiej [the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish People]) emerged in Poland less from the adoption of gender equality and more out of necessity. On the one hand, JDC and TOZ needed Jewish nurses and public health nurses to carry out their health campaigns and build a public health infrastructure. On the other hand, a new generation of Jewish women needed job opportunities that would enable them to make a living and be independent. More broadly this case study shows that the implementation of American "reformative" ideals into the local Polish reality, including in the newly emerging public health field, involved adaptation, negotiation, and in some cases, resentment.

Maps for a Prince

Abstract: This article takes up what and how maps might have taught a Crown Prince in the century before maps became a part of classrooms and Mercator’s system of projection engendered those collective perceptions of space and person that have become a part of a modern shared spatial imagination. The focus of this article is a single codex, utterly unique, which scholars have posited was compiled in 1570 to accompany the Crown Prince of Julich-Cleves-Berg on his Italian trip. This article argues that this codex was designed to teach him practices of spatial imagination, a concept this article introduces.

The superiority of economics and the economics of externalism - a sketch.

Abstract: The article takes as its starting point the relationship of academic economists and the wider society. First, various bodies of literature that deal empirically with this matter are discussed: epistemologically, they range from a bold structuralism via a form of symbolic interactionism to a form of radical constructivism. A Bourdieusian approach is recommended to complement these perspectives with a comprehensive perspective that is sensible to the cultural differences between social groups. Starting from the established notions of field, capital and habitus, the article then attempts to go the initial steps towards formulating a theory of the specificity of academic economics, taking Germany as its example. For that it uses and compares in-depth interviews of recognized and non-recognized German economics students. It shows the thorough interweaving of specific normative and positive dispositions into a conviction of objectivity and disinterestedness. This exploratory empirical induction furthers follow-up questions, the empirical answering of which may help to gain a more complete understanding of the actions and thoughts of economists in their specific contexts.

Giving Tshuve to the sick: correspondence columns of the Yiddish medical press in Poland.

Abstract: ArgumentSeveral Yiddish medical publications of various profiles appeared in independent Poland until 1939. These print media were associated with OZE and TOZ organizational structures and aimed to promote modern concepts of health and healthcare among the Jewish population in its native tongue. Some of these magazines offered space for direct consultations, which took the form of a correspondence corner. Questions sent in by readers ranged from apparently neutral topics, such as a healthy diet or hygiene, to controversial matters tormenting individuals in provincial milieus. The correspondence gives us an insight into popular ways of thinking about health and disease and indicates issues of high importance for a society in the process of modernization. The present paper discusses the questions and answers as they appeared in the Yiddish medical press (particularly in the Folksgezunt and Der Doktor), and presents the most crucial aspects of Jewish life they shed light on, including the historical and cultural background.

Confronting the anomaly: directions in (German) economic research after the crisis.

Abstract: Recurring economic crises, like the one of 2007-2008, led to criticism of economic research and a demand to develop new strategies to avoid them. Standard economic theories use conventional approaches to deal with economic challenges, heterodox theories try to develop alternatives with which to face them. It remains unclear whether the 2007-2008 crisis led to a change in economic research as well as to a consideration of alternative approaches. We used co-word analysis to map the structure of economic research in Germany between 2005 and 2014. Core topics within economic research, such as "market" or "production" hardly shift and can be linked to standard economic theories. Peripheral topics such as "inequality" or "unemployment" show greater dynamics. However, only a few of these topics can be linked to heterodox approaches. Certain changes have occurred in reaction to the 2007-2008 crisis. However, the unchanged importance of standard economic topics raises the question whether these changes are sufficient to face coming economic challenges.

On the evolution of the glass ceiling in Italian academia: the case of economics.

Abstract: Following an international trend, Italy has reformed its university system, especially concerning methods and tools for research evaluation, which are increasingly focused on a number of bibliometric indexes. To study the effects of these changes, we analyze the changing profiles of economists who have won competitions for full professorship in the last few decades in the country. We concentrate on individual characteristics and on scientific production. We show that the identification of a univocal and standardized concept of "research quality" within the new research assessments has progressively imposed a strategy of "homologation," especially for women. We find that women economists are at a higher risk of discrimination than their male colleagues and thus they are more likely to conform their research activities to the standardized profile imposed by the gender-blind application of simplistic bibliometric methods.

Curiosity, youth, and knowledge in the visual and textual culture of the Dutch Republic

Abstract: The imitation of adults was the dominant educational early modern model, as it had been from the classical era. Yet, from 1500 onward, this traditional model clashed with new pedagogical ideals that explored if and how the youthful mind differed from the adult. To investigate this clash, I examine individual and aggregate cases – taken from the Dutch (illustrated) textual culture – representing conceptualizations of what has been labelled “the curiosity family” (concepts such as curiosity, inquisitiveness, invention). As previously established, during the seventeenth century, curiosity turned from a vice to a virtue among adults. Textual evidence suggests that for the early modern Dutch youth, docility, long valued, remained the guiding ideal. Shortly after 1700, however, two changes can be detected: for youth, travel literature and travel as a metaphor became a means to explore the world without adults; and for adults, the experimental learning style of the young became a new learning model.

Attachment and the archive: barriers and facilitators to the use of historical sociology as complementary developmental science.

Abstract: This article explores historical sociology as a complementary source of knowledge for scientific research, considering barriers and facilitators to this work through reflections on one project. This project began as a study of the emergence and reception of the infant disorganized attachment classification, introduced in the 1980s by Ainsworth’s student Mary Main, working with Judith Solomon. Elsewhere I have reported on the findings of collaborative work with attachment researchers, without giving full details of how this came about. Here, I will offer personal reflections arising from the process, and my work in what Hasok Chang has called history as “complementary science.”

Hans Egede (1686-1758) and the alchemical tradition in Denmark-Norway.

Abstract: Hans Egede (1686–1758), the famous missionary and natural historian in Greenland, was one of very few known Norwegian alchemists. This article seeks to place Egede’s alchemy in the context of the European alchemical tradition by identifying his sources in alchemical literature. Through an analysis of Egede’s account of an alchemical experiment performed by him in 1727, Ole Borch, Johann Joachim Becher, and Michael Sendivogius are identified as his main sources. Egede’s procedure and choice of materials are shown to be based on texts by these authors. The article argues that Egede’s alchemical interest was more pervasive than hitherto understood, through the demonstration of connections between his alchemical studies and his work as a natural historian. Further it is argued that Egede’s alchemy was not unique or anachronistic but exemplifies the continued belief in and practice of transmutational alchemy in Denmark-Norway in the early decades of the eighteenth century.

The uses of trauma in experiment: Traumatic stress and the history of experimental neurosis, c. 1925-1975.

Abstract: The article retraces the shifting conceptualizations of psychological trauma in experimental psychopathological research in the middle decades of the twentieth century in the United States. Among researchers studying so-called experimental neuroses in animal laboratories, trauma was an often-invoked category used to denote the clash of conflicting forces believed to lead to neurotic suffering. Experimental psychologists, however, soon grew skeptical of the traumatogenic model and ultimately came to reject neurosis as a disease entity. Both theoretical differences and practical circumstances, such as the technical challenge of stabilizing neurotic symptoms in rats, led to this demise. Yet, despite their reservations, experimental psychologists continued to employ traumatic stimuli to produce psychopathological syndromes. In the 1960s, a new understanding of trauma evolved, which emphasized the loss of control experienced by traumatized animal subjects. These shifting ideas about trauma, I argue, reflect both varying experimental cultures, epistemic norms as well as changing societal concerns.

Introduction: change and persistence in contemporary economics.

Abstract: The financial crisis of 2007-2008 not only shook the global economy, but also directed attention to its intellectual underpinnings in modern economics. To investigate “where it went wrong,” as a 2009 cover of The Economist put it, many scholars have become concerned with the development of economics as a discipline, the role of economic knowledge in political and practical contexts, and the impact of blind-spots in standard economic theory. Building upon the pioneering works of Deirdre McCloskey (1985), Philip Mirowski (1989), Michel Callon (1998), Donald MacKenzie (2006), Marion Fourcade (2009), and Mary Morgan (2012), these scholars have continued analyzing contemporary economics as an academic profession and as a particular way of thinking about social issues. In doing so, they have not only moved forward the classical debates on the peculiarity and performativity of economics, but have also established new domains of research by focusing on the inner workings of central banks, investment banking, or the education of future economists. Some newer review articles and book collections bear witness to the output of this vibrant and expanding field (e.g., Hirschman and Berman 2014; Boldyrev and Svetlova 2016; Kapeller, Pühringer, Hirte, and Ötsch 2016; Maeße, Pahl, and Sparsam 2017; Fourcade 2018; Godechot 2018; Pahl 2018; Schmidt-Wellenburg and Lebaron 2018). In addition, the advent of large-scale citation data has also led to increasing interest for such questions within the economic mainstream, where new forms of the “economics of economics” have become visible over the past years (e.g., Hamermesh 2018; Heckman & Moktan 2018). While indeed a newfound interest of many scientists, research on economics and economic knowledge is actually a classic topic in the history of science – not only due to its political importance, but also because of a marginalized, but still resilient, tradition of studying the history of economic thought as a subject in its own right (see Blaug 2001). Here, economics is described as a highly contested and stratified discipline with a strong cumulative research program at its core that has pushed “dissident” or “heterodox” economists to the edge of the discipline. Accordingly, the academic divide between orthodox, mainstream, and heterodox economics (Colander, Holt, and Rosser 2004; Dobusch and Kapeller 2009) and its impact on the distribution of scientific power are genuine research interests for many (heterodox) economists. With the rise of the social studies of science – further accelerated by the economic downturn of 2008-2009 – the “old” history of economic thought is now supplemented and extended by the “new” sociology of economics focusing more on contemporary economics and its effects on policy, society, and the economy at large. As a matter of fact, all contributions in this issue of Science in Context explore research questions at the intersection of sociology, economics, and the history of economic thought.

Scientific Medicine and the Politics of Public Health: Minorities in Interwar Eastern Europe.

Abstract: The aim of this topical issue is to examine the politics of health in relation to minorities’ health rights in interwar Eastern Europe. This volume brings a fresh look on both the history of interwar Eastern Europe and the history of medicine and public health, by creating a dialogue between these two seemingly unrelated fields, showing the importance of medicine and public health to the understanding of the social and political dimensions of minorities in interwar Eastern Europe. For a long time, the history of medicine was preoccupied mainly with the history of great physicians, scientists, medical discoveries, and the history of the medical profession and institutions. Since the 1970s the “social history turn,” which took place mainly as a result of the entrance of professional social historians, has changed the field of history of medicine dramatically (Huisman and Warner 2004). Social historians were especially valuable as they called attention to the history of social institutions in which healing flourished. Historians of public health pointed to the role of medicine and health in the economic and political spheres, including the rise of the nation state as well as the globalization process (Porter 1999). After World War I, the question of minorities’ civil rights had intensified both in the old countries as well as in the newly created states, which had an important influence on the life of the minorities who lived in their territories. At the same time, many governments as well as medical scientists and social reformers perceived that medicine and public health during the interwar period played an important role in improving the everyday life of populations. The rising relevance of new scientific discoveries in a variety of fields, ranging from bacteriology to physiology, started to have an impact on everyday life by promoting practices such as vaccinations, school and work hygiene, nutrition, and screening programs (Tomes 1998). These new practices gave impetus to the establishment of public health institutions that were perceived as crucial to nation-building projects around the world. These new initiatives were also deeply influenced by the politics of health, which involved questions such as, what are the priorities, who should be included as targets for the new public health interventions, and what is the relation between the new scientific discoveries and the new social and political context that emerged after the Great War. Some minorities perceived the rise of public health as an opportunity to reform their communities, but others approached the new public health measures with suspicion. And in any case, many were ambiguous about the introduction of public health measures into their lives. Scholars of Jewish studies have paid little attention to health and science as a shaping force in the lives of Jews and other minorities in modernity, with some exceptions. Noah Efron explored the relations between science and Judaism and showed how Zionism used science in the process of nation-building. John Efron analyzed the role of medicine and race in the German perception and German-Jews self-perception from the Middle Ages until the 1930s (Efron 2008). Sander Gilman,

Educating physicians in seventeenth-century England - ADDENDUM.

Abstract: The tension between theoretical and practical knowledge was particularly problematic for trainee physicians. Unlike civic apprenticeships in surgery and pharmacy, in early modern England there was no standard procedure for obtaining education in the practical aspects of the physician's role, a very uncertain process of certification, and little regulation to ensure a suitable reward for their educational investment. For all the emphasis on academic learning and international travel, the majority of provincial physicians returned to practice in their home area, because establishing a practice owed more to networks of kinship, patronage and credit than to formal qualifications. Only when (and where) practitioners had to rely solely on their professional qualification to establish their status as young practitioners that the community could trust would proposals to reform medical education, such as those put forward to address a crisis of medicine in Restoration London, which are examined here, be converted into national regulation of medical education in the early nineteenth century, although these proposals prefigured many informal developments in medical training in the eighteenth century.