Histories of Knowledges from Below - Detailseite

In this seminar, we attempt to centre marginalized actors, informal systems, and non-Western epistemologies in order to challenge Eurocentric, institutional narratives of “progress,” “scientific achievement,” and “innovation.” To recover marginalized knowledges, we believe that scholars must employ tools from social history, postcolonial theory, and feminist epistemology. Thus, we deal with the larger issues concerning the relative positions of the field of the history of knowledge to the fields of histories of science and technology.

We live in times where existence and significance of knowledge rarely translates into action capable of averting the collapse of our world. The rise of fascism, right-wing movements, and conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and elsewhere dominate media cycles, yet the knowledge documenting these crises often fails to spur political change. Instead, it risks deepening inertia or legitimizing violence.

In this context, dismantling Western science’s residual hegemony—its foundational myths of superiority and objectivity—might seem foolish. Yet the Western scientific knowledge itself has long weaponized these myths, positioning Western technoscience as inherently progressive while marginalizing or erasing alternative frameworks. It is a challenge—one that must be confronted if we are to understand the origins of the disregard and distrust of knowledge and truth. Our focus, however, will shift to how specific formations of Western knowledges and technology—through historical narratives—have historically positioned themselves as superior, and how to recover and situate the knowledges that were deemed inferior.

• Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith, Pantheon Books, 1972. (excerpts).
• Said, Edward. Pantheon Books, 1978. (excerpts).
• Haraway, Donna. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 575–599.
• Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press, 2000.
• James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 2nd ed., Vintage Books, 1989.
• Hobsbawm, E.J., and Joan Wallach Scott. Political Shoemakers. (excerpts).
• Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. (excerpts).

• Sewell, William. ‘How Classes Are Made: Critical Reflections on E. P. Thompson’s Theory of Working-Class Formation’. In P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, edited by Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland, 50–77. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.

• Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton University Press, 2009.
• Dabhoiwala, Fara. ‘A Man of Parts and Learning’. London Review of Books, 11 November 2024. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n22/fara-dabhoiwala/a-man-of-parts-and-learning.

• Bailey, Peter. ‘Conspiracies of Meaning: Music-Hall and the Knowingness of Popular Culture’. Past & Present 144, no. 1 (1 August 1994): 138–70.
• Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
• Sewell, William H. Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

• Wilner, Isaiah Lorado. ‘Transformation Masks: Recollecting Indigenous Origins of Global Consciousness’. In Indigenous Visions, edited by Isaiah Lorado Wilner and Ned Blackhawk, 3–41. Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas. Yale University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt22h6qn7.5.
• Castro, Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de. ‘Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies’. Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (2004): 463–84.
• Todd, Zoe. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29, no. 1 (2016): 422.  
• Brixius, D. “Enslaved People as Knowledge Carriers.” In Creolised Science: Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Indo-Pacific, Cambridge University Press, 2024, pp. 118–155.
• Brock, Gerald L., ed. Technology and the African-American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for Study. MIT Press, 2004.
• Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. (excerpts)
• Smith, Pamela H. ‘Making as Knowing : Craft as Natural Philosophy’. In Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge, edited by Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook, 17–47. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014.
• Brook, Timothy. Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World. New York Berlin: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009. (excerpts)

• Edgerton, David. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900. Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Mavhunga, Clapperton. Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe. MIT Press, 2014.
• Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. University of Chicago Press, 1966.
• Smith, Pamela H. From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World. University of Chicago Press, 2022.
• Rebay-Salisbury, Katharina, and Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, eds. Embodied Knowledge: Historical Perspectives on Belief and Technology. Oxford: Oxbow, 2012.
• Strebel, Ignaz, Alain Bovet, and Philippe Sormani. “Maintenance and Its Knowledges: Functional Exploration, Biographical Supervision, and Behavioural Examination.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, vol. 8, 2022, pp. 1–12. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2022.2317.
• Mattern, Shannon. "Maintenance and Care." Places Journal, Nov. 2018, https://doi.org/10.22269/181120.
• Dant, Tim. “The Work of Repair: Gesture, Emotion, and Sensual Knowledge.” Sociological Research Online, vol. 15, no. 3, 2010, pp. 97–118. https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.2158.
• Houston, L. “Mobile Phone Repair Knowledge in Downtown Kampala: Local and Trans-Local Circulations.” In Ignaz Strebel, Alain Bovet, and Philippe Sormani, eds. Repair Work Ethnographies, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 91–108. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2110-8_5.
• Elshakry, Marwa. “When Science Became Western: Historiographical Reflections.” Isis, vol. 101, no. 1, 2010, pp. 98–109. https://doi.org/10.1086/652691.
• Daston, Lorraine. “The History of Science and the History of Knowledge.” KNOW: A Journal of the Formation of Knowledge, vol. 1, no. 1, 2017, pp. 131–154.
• Lässig, Simone. “The History of Knowledge and the Expansion of the Historical Research Agenda.” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, vol. 59, 2016, pp. 29–58.
• Renn, Jürgen. “From the History of Science to the History of Knowledge – and Back.” Centaurus, vol. 57, no. 1, 2015, pp. 37–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/1600-0498.12075.

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