INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP SCIENCE AS CULTURAL HEGEMONY: GRAMSCIAN CONCEPTS FOR THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP
SCIENCE AS CULTURAL HEGEMONY:
GRAMSCIAN CONCEPTS FOR THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

22-23-24 January, 2014

Centre d’Història de la Ciència (CEHIC)
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
Societat Catalana d’Història de la Ciència i de la Tècnica (SCHCT)
Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC)
Barcelona

In spite of the longstanding perception of modern science as value-free knowledge of the external world, the boundaries between a supposed ideology-free history of ideas and an ideology-loaded social history of science have been progressively blurred in the last decades. As a result, criticisms of the autonomy and neutrality of modern science have permeated more or less explicitly recent historiography of science. Within such a framework, the profiles, responsibilities and commitments of academics, and especially of those involved in the natural sciences, have been dramatically realigned.
As some recent scholarship has shown, of particular significance in discussing these issues are the reflections of the political thinker Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). In his Prison Notebooks of the 1920s and the 1930s, he provided scholars with an effective vocabulary to critically grasp new interactions between science and society. Key notions such as “cultural hegemony,” and the role of the “intellectuals” (scientists, experts, popularizers, educators), when raised within the context of historiography of science, may help to articulate new approaches for understanding the relationship between science and social control.
The workshop aims at examining and assessing the ways in which hegemonic values and science have been continuously intertwined. It may provide the opportunity to bring to surface the manner in which science—through its practices, conceptions, justifications, transmission, circulation and employment—mirrored power relations in the past.

ON-LINE REGISTRATION

Those attending the workshop but not giving a paper will have to cover a registration fee (50€).

DRAFT PROGRAMME (updated, 18-12-2013)

Institut d’Estudis Catalans, C/Carme, 47
08001-Barcelona
Sala Pere i Joan Coromines

_______________________
Wednesday, 22 January 2014

15:30-15:45: Welcome

15:45-16-30: Introduction
Agustí Nieto-Galan (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
“Revisiting ‘Gramscianism’”

16:30- 17:45: Gramscian Concepts on Science

Chair and comments by: Massimiliano Badino (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Robert Jackson (King’s College, London)
“Science and Ideology in Gramsci and Lukács”

Francesca Antonini (Universita di Pavia)
“Science, history and politics in Gramsci’s thought. Interpreting The Prison Notebooks in the light of the concept of incompleteness”

Aaron J. Berstein (King’s College, London)
“The Role of Science in Gramscian Hegemony”

17:45-17:45: Coffee-Break

17:45-19:00: Science, authority and social control

Chair and comments by: Pietro Daniel Omodeo (MPI for History of Science, Berlin)

Ivan da Costa Marques (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
“On the limits of the authority of scientific facts”

Mariza Romero (Universidade Católica de Sao Paulo)
“Science, nation-building and social exclusion: São Paulo – Brazil – 1889/1930”

Lino Camprubí (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
“Engineering as cultural hegemony: from a history of Francoism to a historiography of Gramsci”

_______________________
Thursday, 23 January 2014

09:45-11:00: Centre-Periphery as a Hegemonic Relation

Chair and comments by: Kostas Gavroglu (University of Athens)

Alejandro Martínez (Universidad Nacional de La Plata)
“Hegemony, “organic” intellectuals and center-periphery relations in the sciences. The case of applied entomology in Argentina (1930-1940)”

Hector Vera et al. (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)
“North-South Relationship in the Development of Science in Latin America”

Daniele Cozzoli (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)
“Gramsci’s Legacy and the Discovery of the Other in Post-war Italian Science: Biocca’s Expedition to Amazonia”

11:00-11:30: Coffee Break

11:30-12:45: Hegemony and Academic Disciplines (I)

Chair and comments by: Ivan da Costa Marques (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)

Arne Schirrmacher (Humboldt University, Berlin)
“The scientific intellectual, a hostile milieu, and a cultural dispositif? Revisiting the historiography of the interwar German physics community and its academic, political and public discourses”

Nele Diekmann (Freie Universität, Berlin)
“ ‘I looked on these tablets as a sort of game preserve’ – The policies of access to ancient script and artifacts in early Victorian Assyriology”

Annelise Lannoy (Ghent University)
“The common cult of the historical truth. The formation of History of Religions in France and the role of the socio-cultural elites”

13:00-15:00: Lunch

15:00-16:15: Hegemony and Academic Disciplines (II)

Chair and comments by: Agustí Nieto-Galan (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Leonardo Ramos, Javier Vadell, Pedro Neves (Universidade Católica da Minas Gerais) “Reading International Relations field through Gramscian lenses: Hegemony, place and intellectuals in the constitution of a social science”

Brendan Hogan (New York University), “Hegemony, Social Science, and Democracy”

Piki Ish-Shalom (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
“Democratic Peace: A Political Biography”

16:15-16:45: Coffee Break

17:00-18:30: Visit to the Museu d’Història de Barcelona

Dinner

________________________________
Friday, 24 January 2014

9:30-11:00: Intellectuals (I): Early Modern

Chair and comments by: Emma Sallent Del Colombo (Universitat de Barcelona)

Luis Miguel Carolino (Instituto Universitario de Lisboa)
Carlos Ziller (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
“O pobre intelectual: Manuel G.G. Lourosa, the astronomy and the political Restoration of Portugal in the 17th century”

Pietro Daniel Omodeo (MPI for History of Science, Berlin)
“Jesuit Science” Without Hegemony? A Historical and Historiographical Problem

Lorelai Kury (Fiocruz-Rio de Janeiro)
“Experience and Study in Francisco Antonio de Sampaio’s Botanical Descriptions (Bahia, Brazil, Second Half of the Eighteenth Century)”

Massimiliano Badino (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
“Physical Order vs. Divine Designer: Celestial Mechanics and Natural Theology struggling for the System of the World”

11:00-11:30- Coffee Break

11:30-12:45: Intellectuals (II): Modern

Chair and comments by: Daniele Cozzoli (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)

Ana Simões (Universidade de Lisboa)
Ana Carneiro, Maria Paula Diogo (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
“Rectors’ Scientists at the University of Lisbon under the I Republic and the Dictatorship (1911-1974). Political entanglements and scientific hegemony”

Adam Netzén (Royal Institut of Technology, Stockholm)
“Gunnar Myrdal: The theory and practice of value-free science and science-based politics”

Matteo Realdi (University of Padua)
“(Re)positioning Jesuit cosmo-theology in Franco's Spain. The place of the science of the universe in the agenda of Antonio Romañá”

13:00-15:00: Lunch

15:45-17:15: Revisiting Science Popularization

Chair and comments by: Matteo Realdi (University of Padua)

Agustí Nieto-Galan (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
“Domination, Appropriation and Resistance: Revisiting ‘popular science’ under a Gramscian framework”

Jaume Sastre-Juan (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
“Philanthropy, Mass Media and Cultural Hegemony: the Rockefeller Foundation and the Politics of Science Popularization in the 1930s”

Isabel Jiménez (Universidad de Málaga)
Jorge Molero, Carlos Tabernero (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
“The struggle for meaning in Q&A sections of the Spanish press in the first third of the 20th Century. The anarchist-libertarian and bourgeois-conservative experiences”

Kostas Gavroglu (University of Athens)
“Science popularization and the propagation of the hegemonic ideology”

17:15-17:45: Coffee Break

17:45-18:45: Key-note lecture:

Roger Cooter (University College London), “Why we need Gramsci Now?”

18:45-19:15: Concluding remarks and final discussion
(Kostas Gavroglu, Pietro Omodeo and Massimiliano Badino)

20:30: Farewell Dinner

Scientific Committee:

Massimiliano Badino, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Kostas Gavroglu, University of Athens
Agustí Nieto-Galan, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Pietro Daniel Omodeo, MPIWG-Berlin
Matteo Realdi, University of Padua
Emma Sallent, Universitat de Barcelona