ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Science and Activism: A Long History

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This session takes a longue durée view on the history of the radical science movement. We use the terms Gegenwissen, contrescience, or “counterscience,” which arose from German, Swiss, and French movements of the 1970s and 1980s, to investigate older politically committed and/or situated forms of knowledge production that staked an assertive claim to be scholarly or scientific, contesting the established order of the disciplines. The session focuses on social and political questions that have been urgent matters of concern for Gegenwissen since the nineteenth century—pauperization, participation, everyday experience, Marxism. The four presentations examine the field of tension within which activism and the sciences have historically interreacted. How did activist researchers adapt the methods and practices of established disciplines in order to substantiate their claims to being scientific or scholarly, and how did such moves reverberate in the academy? What was the nature of counterscience’s formats and spaces, and to what extent did they become institutionalized over time? What epistemic and political objects took shape in that process, with what consequences?
Through these case studies, the session seeks a long history of science capable of embracing political activism and social movements. At first sight, the epistemic virtues of activist research—trust, intimacy, passion, political commitment, empathy, and partisanship—appear to defy the moral code of “good” modern science and scholarship. The history of science, furthermore, conventionally gives precedence to those fields of knowledge where the borders between research and emotion have been most sharply drawn. Our session, in contrast, argues that ever since the modern objectivity paradigm emerged, activist science has operated as far more than just the vanquished Other at the edges of “real” research. Instead, the modern sciences and their countersciences were equiprimordial.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Joanna Radin, Yale

Individual Presentations

• Participation and Information: Alternative Science and the Environmental Movement in the 1970s and 1980s - Nils Guettler, Universität Wien

• The Observation of Workers’ Households and the Monographic Method as an Activist Research Tradition - Martin Herrnstadt, Universität Bremen

• Knowledge of Everyday Life and the Scientific Personae of Engaged Research - Niki Rhyner, Humboldt University Berlin

• Marxism as Counter/Science - Patrick Eiden-Offe, Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) Berlin

Session Organizer

• Niki Rhyner, Humboldt University Berlin