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.
Emma Hagström Molin: The Multiple Timescales and Origins of Nineteenth-Century Archives
In the nineteenth century, archivists started to arrange files according to provenance in the centralized archives of nation states. My talk focuses on how this emblematic change in the organization of historical records interplayed with the different temporalities of nations and sciences. New national time, and the provenances it governed, interplayed with the far more planetary timescales of nature and Christianity. I argue that the provenance principle challenged the scholarly understanding of what scientific order is. Multiple timescales were synchronized and provenance harmonized with the scientific needs of historiography.
Bio: Emma Hagström Molin is an Associate Professor in History of Ideas, Södertörn University.
Erik Isberg: Oceanic timemaking: Scientific temporalities and deep sea core drilling during the International Decade of Ocean Exploration (1971-1980)
In this paper, I seek to explore how the ocean sciences have produced and conceptualized time in the postwar era. I specifically focus on deep sea core drilling. The paper traces how the temporalities of deep sea cores could be enrolled to different scientific and political projects. Even though deep sea cores are often described as “natural archives”, this paper seeks to highlight the interplay between the scientific production of time on the one hand and the political and geographic frameworks in which this production takes place on the other.
Bio: Erik Isberg is a PhD student at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
Kristin Asdal: The little tools: of timing: Co-modifying nature-times with the times of politics
Politics of nature is inextricably linked to time-work: Not only is it a time-issue, but also a timing-issue; about working upon time and about having different modes and versions of time to meet: nature-times in encounters with the times of politics and the ‘little tools’ that do such co-modification work. In combining environmental humanities and the history and politics of science, this paper suggest turning into one of our key-objects of inquiry, - and to take this to include the means and tools that set nature-entities on the move and enable them to become part of political procedure, parliamentary settings and democratic as well as economic practice. In showing this, the paper argues that parliaments are not such exclusively human affairs as they are often thought to be. Empirically the paper delves into these issues by analyzing the controversy over whaling which surrounded these large animals in the late 19th century as well as the more contemporary efforts at seeking to time the Atlantic cod to transform it into a farmed species. More overridingly the paper argues that we cannot understand the history and politics of nature without grasping the time-work that it involves.
Bio: Kristin Asdal is center director and Professor in STS at TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo.