ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

After Loss: Ephemeral Histories of Science and Technology 2 - Ephemeral Sites of Technoscience

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Technoscience has long been a way of building intellectual, social, and material infrastructure to make the natural world knowable. And yet, the history of science and technology is littered with lost objects, forgotten theories, decayed specimens, obsolete instruments. What unites these is not permanence, but ephemerality: whether they were designed to last or to be consumed, they have now lost their form or their purpose. What would it mean to put loss, so often peripheral to our dominant epistemologies, at the centre of historical analysis? We invite reflections on how disappearance, decay and absence may become sources for plural histories of science.

In early modern workshops, objects were continuously reworked, disassembled and transformed. In courts and city streets, experiments were staged, performed and just as quickly dismantled. More recently, infrastructures of extractive modernity, like space exploration programs and industrial pipelines, may be abandoned and survive unevenly across global landscapes. Media obsolescence, both planned and unplanned, threatens the durability of supports and software readability, preparing future archival absences.

This panel invites material, visual, and text-based histories that confront the challenge of what is damaged, obscure, or even absent, such as: demolished buildings, abandoned laboratories, broken instruments, objects with no known provenance, histories of missing objects, ephemera and infrastructural ruin, and extinct species.

How can loss be a source for the history of technoscience? By attending to such absences, we aim to question whose knowledge is preserved, and whose is lost. As loss is increasingly all around us, we encourage scholars to reclaim ephemerality not as a failure, but as a feature of the history of knowledge – and in doing so to bring forth histories that resist ideas of linear progress and individual authority.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Roberta Spada, University of Padua

Commentator

• Simon Werrett, University College London

Individual Presentations

• Wasting the City: Guasti, Material Loss, and the Infrastructural Afterlives of Early Modern Destruction - Chiara Capulli, Pantheon e Castel Sant'Angelo – Direzione Musei nazionali della città di Roma

• The Handsteine and the Ore Mountain: A Sixteenth Century History of Loss - Emily Hyatt, Yale University

• Threads of Ephemerality. Craft Knowledge, Fragmented Landscapes, and the Piedmontese Silk Industry in the Early Modern Period - Mario Grassi, University of Padua

• The Historian of Science and the Silence of Material Sources: The Models of the Paduan Anatomical Theatre as a Case Study - Elena Rizzi, University of Padua

Session Organizers

• Antonia Belli, University College London / Bibliotheca Hertziana

• Roberta Spada, University of Padua