The Science, Capitalism, and Knowledge Commodities reading group will meet next Tuesday, 23 November from 2 to 3:30 PM Eastern.
Gustave Lester, PhD. Candidate, Harvard University and Beckman Dissertation Fellow at the Science History Institute will present a draft of his dissertation chapter: "Mineral Resources and Economic Nationalism in the Early Republic, 1780-1815."
The Zoom link will be available on the reading group webpage. We look forward to an exciting and productive discussion!
This working group invites scholars to think about knowledge creation through the analytical lens of capitalist extraction. Why capitalist extraction in particular? Because scientific extraction often occurs on account of the logic of the market and then yields materials refined according to that same logic. This market can be economic, in the case of bio-pirated pharmaceuticals, or intellectual, in the case of the search for dark matter. Historians and sociologists of science have in recent decades insisted on the materiality of scientific knowledge. An emphasis on practices, places, and material cultures have brought knowledge out of the aether and into the hands of laborers, technicians, scientists, and lay practitioners carrying out their actions in concrete settings. Thinking of knowledge in terms of resources or raw materials refined into commodities takes a further step in this direction. Resource extraction opens up questions about the means and social conditions, sometimes in a colonial context, of knowledge production. Refinement sheds light on continuums between the land and the lab, and on the technological systems required to process observations into a final product.
Group Conveners:
Eun-Joo Ahn
Joshua McGuffie
Lee Vinsel
Claire Votava
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Past Meetings
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Evan Hepler-Smith, Duke University, "Handbook chemistry" from his ms. Compound Words: Chemical Information and the Molecular World, on the 19th century emergence of the chemical handbook and the chemical abstract journal.
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Liat Spiro, College of the Holy Cross, "Patentability and Experience: Work, Class, and Risk in the Political Economy of Intellectual Property in Imperial Germany," on patenting as a domain of social politics and workplace political economy in Imperial Germany.
Group Conveners
187 Members
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