ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Lost in Translation? Science Wars from a Transnational Perspective

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

The Science Wars of the 1990s and its protagonists influence the standpoints and approaches in the history of science to this day. While the central issue of defending realism and science against its enemies seems to have returned with inverted political prefixes, we lack a historical understanding of the Science Wars’ political bearings. The panel will contribute to this historicization by decentring US-focused narratives about the Science Wars and strengthening a transnational analysis. With this approach we aim to emphasize the plurality of meanings the epistemological struggles of the 1990s displayed depending on the regional contexts. The proposed panel brings together novel perspectives on the Science Wars from three different regional contexts to reflect on how the epistemological struggles travelled and how they were reinterpreted and appropriated beyond the US.

We will use the Sokal Hoax as a starting point for exploring country-specific case studies. In France, the Sokal Hoax reconfigured the uses of the label “relativism” in French-speaking social sciences. In German public intellectual debates, the Sokal hoax not only invigorated and broadened discussions about the role of postmodernism in German academic culture but also served as a projection screen for political and societal self-reflections. Further afield in Czechia, the Sokal Hoax was used by public-facing physicists as another argument in an existing dispute with emerging liberal intellectuals and former anti-socialist dissidents, whose critique of socialist science had become intertwined with postmodernist thought.

As the debates moved to a wider audience, the actors subsequently adjusted the self-description of their role in the conflict, for instance to support each other between France and Great Britain. Our goal is not merely to explore how ideas are put into circulation. Rather, we are interested in how these reinterpretations and misunderstandings in the translation of terms and concepts between different discursive contexts informed the points of contention in the Science Wars themselves. This way, we want to provide empirical evidence for a more complex understanding of the epistemological struggles, both past and present, that goes beyond the binary divide of realism versus relativism.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Jan Golinski, University of New Hampshire

Individual Presentations

• Science Wars between Postmodernism and Postsocialism: A View from East-Central Europe - Martin Babička, Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences

• Remembrance, Reunification, and Relativism. Situating the Science Wars in the German Post-Reunification Moment - Meike Katzek, University of Erfurt

• Scientists to the fore: writing the Science Wars - Natacha Demoule, Université Paris-Cité - SPHere laboratory

Session Organizers

• Meike Katzek, University of Erfurt

• Martin Babička, Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences

• Natacha Demoule, Université Paris-Cité - SPHere laboratory