Dear Colleagues,
If you were interested the topic of social design
evolving in the recent thread opened by Jean Schneider
and expanded by Victor Margolin, Terry Love, and
others, this conference may interest you.
The issues on the conference agenda also touch
on the nature and role of expert scholars in the
research university, and on themes involving doctoral
education.
Best regards,
Ken Friedman
Call for Papers
Expert Cultures and Social Engineering in the 19th Century. Scientists,
Scholars and Institutional Politics between Germany and the United States.
Workshop at the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., April 26-27,
2002
Conveners: Philipp Loeser (University of Goettingen/GHI/AICGS) - Christoph
Strupp (GHI)
The development of 19th century scholarly research is characterized by
expansion, specialization and increasingly self-referential modes of
operation. The rise of research universities, encouraged first in Europe
and with some delay in the United States, had a tremendous impact. A new
professional apparatus with a seminar system, laboratories, reference
tools, and scientific journals shaped professional activities. Distinct
sets of methodologies and legitimation strategies developed within each
discipline. As a result, the overall focus shifted from the universal
orientation of humanist education to specialized professional training. The
ideals of Bildung and cosmopolitan scholarship were still held in high
esteem, but they nevertheless stood at odds with the development of
relatively autonomous expert cultures. Many of the new forms of knowledge
were difficult to integrate into the Bildung of the individual. At the same
time, academics' influence on culture and society seemed to decline; they
had increasing difficulty in making themselves heard outside their own
fields of study. The success story of the research university can also be
read as the story of alienation of many of the individuals involved.
Professional careers at universities drifted apart from those in politics,
law, or the business world. Interests beyond the field of academics could
no longer be articulated directly and with immediate results.
Our workshop will explore how individuals sought to participate in the
engineering of culture and society and how they established themselves as
authorities beyond their scholarly disciplines while the drift towards
formal expertise counteracted this goal. We will approach this problem by
focusing on Germans and Americans who in the 1860s and 1870s were involved
in the process of transfering German models of research, education, and
institution building to the United States. This phenomenon is
well-documented, but has not yet been fully appreciated as an example of
social engineering: German professors appointed to American universities
and Americans trained in Germany found themselves in the middle of a
dynamics of changing institutions, curricula, and individual roles inside
and outside the university system. They had to redefine their work's
relation to society and in the process invariably impacted the latter.
The developments in the United States during the last quarter of the 19th
century offer a perfect background for the discussion of cultural and
social strategies employed by key scholars and scientists, by leaders of
the new universities like Johns Hopkins, Cornell or Chicago University, and
by people involved in the transfer of entire research institutions such as
libraries and laboratories. The workshop calls for a reexamination of
individual agendas and courses of action as positionings within frameworks
of shifting traditions, value hierarchies, institutions, political settings
and other social and cultural contexts. The achievements of institutional
and intellectual history and the history of science are to be reinscribed
into individual careers and courses of life.
We would like to invite speakers from both sides of the Atlantic to present
their research at the GHI. Please send a short proposal (500 words)
together with your postal and e-mail address no later than January 20 to
either one of the conveners. Presentations at the workshop should not
exceed 25 minutes. The German Historical Institute will cover lodging and
travel expenses of the participants.
Dr. Philipp Loeser or Dr. Christoph Strupp
German Historical Institute
1607 New Hampshire Ave., NW
Washington, D.C. 20009
USA
Tel.: 202-387 3355
Fax: 202-483 3430
Email: [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]
|