The Journal for the History of Knowledge includes an annual special issue, compiled by guest editors, which explores a theme central to the journal’s scope.
We are currently accepting proposals for the Summer 2023 Special Issue. Proposals should contain the following:
Please send your proposal to all three editors:
Sven Dupré (s.g.m.dupre@uu.nl),
Renée Schilling (renee.schilling@huygens.knaw.nl), and
Geert Somsen (g.somsen@maastrichtuniversity.nl).
Proposal deadline: 30 June 2021
Notification of acceptance: by 30 September 2021
After submission, all manuscripts will go through a process of peer-review, author’s revisions, and copy-editing. JHoK is an Open Access journal, in principle at no charge to the authors.
Details of the journal's scope and a full list of the editorial team and advisory editorial board is available on the journal's website.
Posted on 16 Apr 2021
We are pleased to announce the upcoming special issue: Situated Nature: Field collecting practices and the construction of scientific locality in the long nineteenth century, with guest editors Catarina Madruga and Deborah Dubald. It is scheduled to appear in the fall of 2022.
The abstract of the special issue:
Field collecting is a combined result of specific gestures of the hand, the use of dedicated tools, a heavy reliance on intermediaries, on-site negotiations of natural history knowledge, and the mobilisation of a variety of agencies. The authors of this special issue illuminate how this gesture was not neutral but rather embedded in political meaning by exploring the relationship between field collecting and the construction of authority, identity, and social capital.
The collective aim is to show how collection-based knowledge was a result of the co-creation of indigenous, artisanal, and administrative knowledge. The contributions highlight how the history of natural knowledge depended on non-European and non-dominant ways of knowing. Together, the papers present a considerable geographical range, including case-studies of field collecting in Australia, India, Cape Verde, Chile, France, Spain, and Serbia. The different papers describe how killing, sampling, preserving, packing, and shipping specimens revealed hierarchical and socially situated dimensions of knowledge production. They will underline distinctions in the ambiguous figure of the field collector, explore the gendered practices of field collecting, and highlight the impact of local negotiation and translation in the epistemological process. By focusing on the nineteenth century, the volume will articulate how dreams of empire, nation, and tamed nature translated into practical economies of knowledge at the local scale. The field is featured as a contested space where scientific locality was constructed, identities were negotiated, and authority was reiterated.
Posted on 29 Mar 2021
March 11, 2021 18:15 to 19:45
Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen invite you to celebrate the publication of “Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge,” the inaugural Special Issue of the Journal for the History of Knowledge. This collection of nine case studies develops a new approach to analyzing bureaucratic procedures by focusing on the epistemic dimensions of rule following and routines. It is the collective result of a working group of historians who focus on different periods and regions, such as the medieval Latin West, Spanish America, Qing China, and the Ottoman Empire. Together, we make the case that understanding bureaucracies in the past is best done by attending to the knowledge processes that they have enabled and by which they have been sustained. By doing so, we aim to enrich the emerging field of history of knowledge and demonstrate how historical epistemology can be made productive for areas otherwise well known to political, social, and cultural historians.
Join the guest editors, authors, and journal editors for a conversation and for a virtual toast!
Related Project(s)
Address
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Boltzmannstraße 22, 14195 Berlin, Germany
Room
Zoom/Online Meeting Platform
Contact and Registration
Please register by sending an email to bureaucracies@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de by March 7, 2021.
Posted on 26 Feb 2021
The Journal for the History of Knowledge includes an annual special issue, compiled by guest editors, which explores a theme central to the journal’s scope.
We are currently accepting proposals for the Fall 2022 Special Issue.
Proposals should contain the following:
Please send your proposal to all three editors:
Sven Dupré (s.g.m.dupre@uu.nl),
Renée Schilling (renee.schilling@huygens.knaw.nl), and
Geert Somsen (g.somsen@maastrichtuniversity.nl).
Proposal deadline: 14 December 2020
Notification of acceptance: before 26 February 2021
After submission, all manuscripts will go through a process of peer-review, author’s revisions, and copy-editing. JHoK is an Open Access journal, in principle at no charge to the authors.
Details of the journal's scope can be found here.
A full list of the editorial team and advisory editorial board is available here.
Posted on 09 Sep 2020
We are pleased to announce the upcoming special issue: Histories of Ignorance, with guest editors Lukas Verburgt and Peter Burke. It is scheduled to appear in the fall of 2021.
A quote from the proposal:
Our suggestion for the 2020s and beyond is that the new field of the history of knowledge should also be a history of ignorance, both of what is known in German as Unwissen (general ignorance) and Nichtwissen (ignorance of something specific). It is simply impossible to draw a sharp contrast between the production and circulation of knowledge, on the one hand, and that of ignorance, on the other hand: rather, we should study the changing and hierarchical relationship between them. What becomes clear is that the central questions standing at the heart of the history of knowledge are, in fact, questions about the connections between what is known and unknown, what is knowable and unknowable and who is deemed knowledgeable and unknowledgeable in different epochs and cultures. Both a tour d’horizon and a programmatic outline of the historical study of a highly timely topic, in science as well as in society, this agenda-setting special issue brings together a diverse group of scholars. Their contributions explore ignorance in different places and periods and from perspectives ranging from the history of science to global history and social anthropology – each emphasizing how ignorance is, and should be, central to every history of knowledge.
Posted on 03 Mar 2020
The Journal for the History of Knowledge, to be launched in 2020, includes an annual special issue, compiled by guest editors, which explores a theme central to its scope.
We are currently accepting proposals for the Fall 2021 Special Issue.
Proposals should contain the following:
Please send your proposal to all three editors:
Sven Dupré (s.g.m.dupre@uu.nl);
Ilja Nieuwland (ilja.nieuwland@huygens.knaw.nl), and
Geert Somsen (g.somsen@maastrichtuniversity.nl).
Proposal deadline: 16 December 2019
Notification of acceptance: before 29 February 2020
After submission, all manuscripts will go through a process of peer-review, author’s revisions, and copy-editing. JHoK is an Open Access journal, in principle at no charge to the authors.
Details of the journal's scope can be found here
A full list of the editorial team and advisory editorial board is available here.
Posted on 25 Sep 2019
We are delighted to announce that The History of Bureaucratic Knowledge: Global Comparisons, c. 1200 - c. 1900 has been selected as the inaugural special theme issue of the Journal for the History of Knowledge. Edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen, it will appear in 2020.
To quote from the proposal:
"This collective publication makes the claim that the history of bureaucracy is, at its core, a history of bureaucratic knowledge. It is therefore best studied with the methods developed to historicize scientific practices. We follow knowledge-making practices as they moved across company headquarters, government bureaus, the study, and the field. In fact, fundamental practices such as writing, calculation, and record-keeping flourished first to administer states before they were used to study nature. The entwined history of science and bureaucracy is increasingly coming into focus, as the history of science continues to broaden into the history of knowledge. Furthermore, colonial historians, anthropologists, and media scholars have come to study the epistemic power of states with approaches that are comparable to those used by historians of science. In short, our volume comes at a critical juncture in the development of disciplines that study knowledge in the past and that make these investigations relevant to current policy concerns.”
Visit the website www.journalhistoryknowledge.org to follow the publication of this issue. We expect that the call for the next special issue, to be published in 2021, will be posted in July.
Posted on 01 Jul 2019
Posted on 11 Mar 2019