Chaired by Staffan Bergwik
Scientific knowledge builds on, and investigates, multiple temporalities. It envisions and explores timescales in nature and society – from eons to nanoseconds, from repeated cycles to sweeping changes, from the tempi of nature to alterations in cultural life. Yet research also has its own multifaceted rhythms. Knowledge can be seen as cumulative or radically shifting, yet any idea of knowledge presupposes temporal ideas. This panel contributes with historical analyses of multiple temporalities of scientific knowledge in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The papers discuss how scientific knowledge has produced and conceptualized timescales, paces and rhythms of change in nature and society. How have temporalities been represented and envisioned in scientific data, discourse and imagery, e.g. through ideas of chronology, origin, archives or timelines? Moreover, the papers explore how temporal notions have structured science as a cultural practice. What are the rhythms of knowledge making? Importantly, the papers explore how scientific temporalities have emerged at the intersections of science, nature and political institutions. How do scientific temporal regimes intervene in debated concerns like the environment or the state of the knowledge society.
Julia Nordblad: Biodiversity and the temporalities of planetarity
Dipesh Chakrabarty has been a central figure in the recent “planetary turn” in the humanities. This paper starts from his suggestion that the planet is a useful category for understanding the escalating ecological crisis, and suggests a new empirical focus to develop that category. The paper examines the successful attempt by some conservation biologists to popularize their concerns for the destruction of nature by inventing the concept of biodiversity in the 1980s. Actors laid out temporal aspects of biodiversity loss, and reframed environmental concerns by proposing a distinct idea of a planetary temporality that circumscribed the place of humanity in the history of Life.
Bio: Julia Nordblad is a lecturer at the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University.
Marit Ruge Bjærke: Alien species futures
This paper explores the production of “knowledge of the future” in discourses on invasive alien species. Through a close-reading of Norwegian guidelines for risk assessment of invasive alien species, the paper investigates the consequences of these future oriented practices, the role they play in turning the alien species from uncontrollable threats into manageable entities. The paper discusses the temporal scales on which alien species are understood, and how temporal understandings in the alien species discourse tie in with and differ from those of other environmental problems.
Bio: Marit Ruge Bjærke is a researcher in Cultural Studies, University of Bergen.
Staffan Bergwik: Scientometrics as a time-binding technique: The history and growth of science in the 1950s and 1960s
Scientometrics was launched in the 1950s to apply a scientific method to science itself. This paper investigates scientometrics as a time-binding technique. It explores images of periods and rhythms in the past, as well as the current state of science and its progress, produced in scientometrics. The science of science was described as regulatory knowledge and a policy instrument. Which temporalities were created through this envisioned relation between scientific knowledge and political institutions?
Bio: Staffan Bergwik is a Professor in History of Ideas, Stockholm University