Workshop: Alternative Historical Paths for the Biological Sciences

Exploring alternative historical paths for the biological sciences. Email g.m.radick@leeds.ac.uk for more info

This workshop offers an opportunity for scholars from the range of disciplines served by ISHPSSB to reflect critically and collectively on three questions about alternative historical paths for the biological sciences: (1) what they might have been; (2) how we can know about them (if at all); and (3) whether inquiry into the might-have-been or “counterfactual” scientific past should be regarded as part of the ordinary business of historians of biology, as it is for the biologists they study. 

Workshop contributions will:

(i)                  encourage cross-traffic between the well-developed literature on contingency and inevitability in the history of life and the much less well-developed literature on contingency and inevitability in the historical development of the life sciences (and the sciences generally)

(ii)                 engage with counterfactual history as an increasingly important part of the toolkit for scholars from the Global South and indigenous communities in challenging historiographic received wisdom and the power asymmetries that standard histories often reflect and reinforce