Exploring new perspectives on the material culture of expeditionary science
Deadline: July 15, 2024
Workshop Oct 18-19, 2024 at the TU Braunschweig, Germany
Organized by Eike-Christian Heine and Sarah Pickman, supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG.
Expeditions are not just a thing of the past. While the word “expedition” may conjure up the scientific and colonial practices of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they remain an important and highly visible way of organizing field research, communicating scientific results to the public, and raising awareness of researchers’ work. For example, consider the Mosaic Expedition to the Arctic, which took place between 2019 and 2020. Its leaders intentionally froze the German research vessel Polarstern into the Arctic pack ice near the North Pole, with which it drifted for more than a year. While the primary goals of the expedition were to study the processes of anthropogenic global warming and to increase public understanding of this pressing issue, the Mosaic Expedition is also part of a long tradition of expeditionary science. And because expeditions remain important to the practice and image of science, historians are continually compelled to explore the historical context of voyages of discovery and discuss the implications of past expeditions for shaping the science of the present and future.
“How can we tell new stories of exploration?” is one of the questions we (a group of about 15 historians) have been discussing over the past two years as part of the German Research Foundation (DFG) funded network “Modern Expeditions: Politics, Actors and Epistemologies of Scientific Travel.” Now, we would like to invite new colleagues to join us and to share their research on the material culture of the history of exploration in a workshop at the Technical University of Braunschweig (Historical Institute, History of Science and Technology, Prof. Dr. Christian Kehrt) on October 18-19, 2024.
We invite reflections on a specific object that was part of expeditionary science. Each presentation should follow the traces of this object and use it as a tool to discuss a particular perspective on the history of exploration. In the past two decades, a number of scholars have expanded our understandings of the material culture of exploration by focusing on scientific instruments that were carried on expeditionary voyages, and on the specimens and artifacts these expeditions collected. With this workshop, we seek to go beyond these two categories of objects and investigate the more mundane, often overlooked things that were also integral to mobile science. “No instruments, no specimens” is how we previously jokingly described the material objects we want to discuss. For if part of the origin of the study of material culture was the colonial enterprise of collecting and organizing the “things” made by non-European cultures, we wanted to turn that perspective on its head. We want to use the objects that facilitated Western exploration to study these historical cultures and think about how we should remember, memorialize or musealize them. So far, ten participants in the network have agreed to contribute. The objects they are studying include, e.g.:
- a missionary’s umbrella and the history of colonial geography,
- a natural sponge in the collection of the Egyptian expedition of Lepsius (1842-1845) and the role of sponge fishing in the history of archaeology,
- a punch card in the collection of the Technoseum Mannheim and its significance for atmospheric science, and
- a tape recorder used by disaster researchers and the complex social interactions and reflections it prompted.
We now have the ability to invite five additional collaborators for our workshop. Financial support for transportation and accommodation is possible. A peer-reviewed publication is planned following the discussions at the workshop. Please consider the following timeline:
– July 15: Title and short abstract (150 words) to eikechristian.heine@googlemail.com & sarah.pickman@gmail.com
– July 17: Notification of acceptance or rejection
– September 29: Title and long abstract (1,000-1,500 words) to eikechristian.heine@googlemail.com & sarah.pickman@gmail.com
– October 18-19: Workshop at the Technical University of Braunschweig
