Twentieth-century European and American scientists lived and operated within a world of competing ideologies. The challenges of the two world wars and changing regimes promoted political activism and required frequent declarations of one’s views and beliefs. Scholars often served as experts for various national and international bodies and got engaged in social engineering and projects which, in essence, aimed to improve international relations and make a world a better place.
Prisma Ukraïna Workshop
Mo 25 Jun 2018 | 10:00–18:45
Mo 25 Jun 2018 | 10:00–18:45
Transnational Conversations: Scientists and the Big Questions of Twentieth-Century History
convened by Olga Linkiewicz (Prisma Ukraïna Visiting Fellow 2018), Katrin Steffen (Nordost-Institut Lüneburg an der Universität Hamburg, IKGN e.V.) and Maciej Górny (T. Manteuffel Institute of History, PAN, DHI Warschau)
Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin
At the same time, the ideologies in their various incarnations interfered in these scholars’ lives, making personal experience a part of a broader conversation about identity defined in racial and national terms. This workshop will explore the confluence of scientific ideas and personal experience to show how scientists addressed the big questions of the twentieth century, such as colonialism, antisemitism, fascism, communism, mass political mobilization, and migration. By doing so, it considers the ways in which the big questions can be integrated into the history of science. The workshop will focus on the exchange of approaches to these questions between entities that we stereotypically call the East and the West. In particular, the workshop seeks to discuss the complex and multidimensional character of the exchange that neither “transfer” nor “circulation of knowledge” can sufficiently explain.
