Knowledge Notes
Occasional notes on calls, events, publications, and more that caught our attention.
Category: Experts and Expertise
An Instrument of Social Control: The Scientization of Drunkenness
Contrasts three interpretations of drunkenness within the academic discourse of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: drunkenness as a disease, as an addiction, and as a form of degeneration and shows how these interpretations impacted the public perception of excessive drinkers.
Floating Food/Filming Knowledge: Creating Food Knowledge above the Clouds
Details the food knowledge gained when NASA sent astronauts to America’s SkyLab space station and experimented with different packaging.
Everyday Knowledge, Science, and Psychiatric Committals during Germany’s Age of Extremes
Author presents her book “Psychiatric Institutions and Society,” which probes how the serious and sometimes fatal decision was made to admit individuals to asylums during Germany’s age of extremes.
Styles of Reasoning and the History of Knowledge
The author presents his book, which constitutes an analytical account of Ian Hacking’s styles of reasoning project and explores its philosophical implications.
Provenance Research as History of Knowledge: Archaeological Finds from the Syrian-Turkish Border at the British Museum
Reviews the cases of Deve Hüyük, Tell Halaf, and Carchemish to underline that a better understanding of the genesis of collections makes it possible to explain the distribution of finds and to discern gaps in our knowledge about them.
Exploring Histories of Risk and Knowledge
Discusses history of risk as an emerging field and the ways it overlaps with the history of knowledge. Uses transnational perspectives on fire-fighting technologies as an example.
Why Should You Trust Geometry? The Mathematics of Mining in Early Modern Germany
My book Underground Mathematics tells the story of a discipline that has been forgotten today, subterranean geometry. Known as “the art of setting limits” (Markscheidekunst) in German and geometria subterranea in Latin
Owning the (Deep) Past: Paleontological Knowledge and the Political Afterlives of Fossils
Who do fossils belong to? The question is far from new: in various guises, it has preoccupied paleoscientists, museum curators, and occasionally officials for many years, although ongoing debates about the decolonization of science and natural history collections have renewed its significance.
Knowledge Notes
Occasional notes on calls, events, publications, and more that caught our attention.
