ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Crisis, Capriciousness, and Control in the Technosciences

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

English Abstract

Crises are not just external shocks to stable social or natural orders. They are perspective-dependent episodes where boundaries between "nature," "society," and technoscience collapse under contradiction. This roundtable explores capriciousness as a key idiom linking crisis, knowledge, and technique from early modern anxieties about celestial unpredictability and colonial disorder, to contemporary struggles with volatile systems, insurgent actors, and proliferating futures. Our goal is to examine how fear of capriciousness, whether triggered by unruly climates, unstable models, rebellious subjects, or epistemic uncertainties, provokes technoscientific intervention and rearticulates strategies of control. Rather than viewing crises as self-evident events, we emphasise their situated nature and explore how positionality, scale, and institutional power shape their construction and management. By drawing on diverse episodes across time and place, we invite historians of science to consider capriciousness not only as a symptom of crisis, but as a generative idiom for tracing the shifting boundaries of knowledge, authority, and control.

Speakers:
Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh: A case from 17th century southern Africa, where Doman, a Khoekhoe go-between, blends gunpowder knowledge with local rainfall expertise to contest colonial control.
Thomás Haddad: Perspectives on crises from early modern Latin America, where unruly skies, landscapes, and colonial subjects provoke technoscientific control and imaginative interpretation.
Amelia Urry: A case from 20th century climate science where speculative catastrophe and apocalyptic framings act to stabilise proliferating uncertainties.
Rory D. Kent: A comparative analysis of bourgeois theorisations of capricious labour, from early scientific management to contemporary ideologies of individuality, as means of workplace control.
Jenny Bulstrode: A case from the 18th century Caribbean, where enslaved Black watchmakers challenge dominant perspectives on science and technology from the origins of the climate crisis onwards.
Marine Bellégo: A case from 19th century Calcutta, when British administrators rebuilt the Botanic Gardens following two cyclones, revealing colonial attempts to tame botanical capriciousness.

Sub Unit

• Roundtable

Participants

• Jenny Bulstrode, University College London

• Amelia Urry, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge

• Marine Bellégo, Université Paris Cité

Session Organizers

• Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh, University of Amsterdam

• Rory Dean Kent, University of Cambridge

• Thomás Haddad, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil