Teaching

Science and Technology under Socialism (Hauptseminar)

This course offers a historical overview of various aspects of relationships among science, technology, and politics in certain economic and political settings. It mostly focuses on the state of science and technology in the Soviet Union while also bringing into discussion other socialist regimes of the twentieth century. The course is organized thematically (around several thematic sessions) and chronologically. Topics covered include knowledge production and governing strategies, science communication and diplomacy, environmental projects and nuclear power. Each session aims at engaging participants of the course with the recent scholarship (historical analysis) and to familiarize them with learning though the usage of primary sources. Materials used for the purposes of the course will also include different visual and audial sources as well as objects that can be experienced emotionally (items that can be touched or tasted). Each session seeks to provide information that might help contextualizing historical and theoretical information, allowing to learn in a multidimensional way. This course has a twofold purpose: to expand the knowledge in history of science and technology and to deepen understanding of the history of socialist societies predominantly the Soviet Union from the perspective of the history of science and technology.

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Epistemology of the Familiar (Hauptseminar)

In 1994 Lorraine Daston introduced (or better reintroduced) the term historical epistemology as “the history of the categories that structure our thought, pattern our arguments and proofs, and certify our standards for explanation.” A whole generation of historians of science employed historical epistemology as a way to study scientific knowledge by exploring the history of higher-order epistemic concepts such as objectivity, observation, and experimentation or the historical trajectories of epistemic things. This course briefly explores major works in historical epistemology by focusing on new “objects of knowledge,” new “styles of reasoning,” and new “modes of objectivity.” At the same time, it goes one step forward and asks what has been the role of materiality and its politics in the production of scientific knowledge.
We will further introduce the term of “epistemology of the familiar” as a way to understand how epistemic authority has been bestowed on those objects that have little to do with science; how these same objects, which occupy the market as commodities as well as our everyday lives as expressions of our intimate desires, have been tweaked and adjusted; how they have been often returned to the site of their production, the scientific laboratory, for improvement and modification. In other words, how do mundane objects—transformed epistemic objects—by being familiar, become valuable sources of our knowledge about society and the world?  For example, we are going to ask how a humble materiality such as a box could be epistemologically important. Hence, the sociological and historical attention of this course is centered on the familiar that often remains unnoticed. The interest is not on the history of familiar objects but on the epistemic power that familiarity exercises on human lives.

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