ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Whose Values Count? Political Commitments, Marginal Voices, and the Construction of Scientific Legitimacy

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This session examines how political, institutional, and social commitments shaped the conditions under which scientific claims gained credibility from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Rather than treating method as autonomous, the four papers show how scientific legitimacy emerged through negotiations among disciplinary norms, state agendas, and marginalized communities seeking recognition as epistemic agents. Despite their diverse settings, the contributions reveal a common dynamic: actors repeatedly confronted the tension between dominant value regimes and alternative epistemic possibilities, making visible the historically recurring negotiations that structured legitimate knowledge.

By following cases from early physical chemistry, wartime American science policy, Cold War physics and space research, and HIV/AIDS activism in Southern Europe, the panel brings together distinct institutional and geopolitical settings. Taken together, the papers span the United States and multiple European contexts, underscoring the transnational circulation of value regimes and the political conditions that shaped scientific authority. These episodes reveal how concerns about expertise, autonomy, state coordination, rivalry, and evidential standards were embedded in methodological ideals that shaped scientific practice.

“Epistemic disobedience” provides the session’s conceptual thread: each paper explores how actors unsettled taken-for-granted criteria of authority, whether through interdisciplinary boundary-crossing, contestation of state coordination, internalization of geopolitical conflict, or activist critiques of biomedical norms. Together, the papers invite an integrated historiographical account of how value-laden practices shaped scientific legitimacy across political orders, institutional environments, and epistemic communities.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Evangelia (Lina) Chordaki

Commentator

• Ellen Logan, Maastricht University

Individual Presentations

• Epistemic Disobedience and the Making of Physical Chemistry: Reimagining Interdisciplinarity through Gender - Dimitris Kalogiannis, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens; Maria Amiridi-Wiedenmayer, National and Kapodistrian University Athens

• Contra Kilgore: Scientist Autonomy in the 1940s American Political Sphere - Erik Lynch, Michigan State University

• Competing for Truth: Cold War Rivalry and the Methodological Values of Science - Konstantinos Papathanasiou, National Kapodistrian University of Athens

• HIV Activism in South Europe: A Historical Case of Epistemic Disobedience - Antonis Efstratiou, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Session Organizer

• Maria Amiridi-Wiedenmayer, National and Kapodistrian University Athens