ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Crisis of Science in the United States and Its Potential Global Impact: An Exchange with Mitchell G. Ash, John Krige and Kostas Tampakis

Session Submission Type: Business Meeting

English Abstract

On 18 October 2025 the ESHS issued a statement on the ongoing assault on academic freedom in the United States. Since this is an urgent theme demanding more than one official declaration, we wish to follow up our pronouncement by organizing a special session. Such an assault appears to pose a fundamental methodological challenge to historians of science and technology: How can we discuss genuinely historical events happening in the present, which affect us directly, and still maintain any kind of analytical distance? Since the assault on academic freedom in the United States affects the possibility of doing scientific, technological or humanistic research of any kind, and may have a long term impact on science and scholarship worldwide, how can we NOT address this topic? In this session the roots of this transformation are analyzed and strategies of opposition collectively considered.

Sub Unit

• ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Chairs

• Mitchell G. Ash, University of Vienna

• John Krige, Georgia Institute of Technology

• Kostas Tampakis, National Hellenic Research Foundation