Selection of 2028 Special Issue

The Journal for the History of Knowledge is pleased to announce the selection of the 2028 Special Issue, "Capriciousness in the Making of Knowledge", with guest editors Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh and Rory D. Kent.

Articles will be released online in 2028, with paper copies available from early 2029. 

This special issue proposes understanding knowledge production through the motif of capriciousness. Capriciousness describes actors’ attributions of volatility to aspects of their environment – whether natural, social, or technological – in which existing knowledges prove inadequate. Crucially, capriciousness is perspective-dependent: what appears unpredictable to one group of actors may be self-evident to others. Moreover, capriciousness is distinct from mere uncertainty, so far as attributions of the former entail not only awareness of ignorance but anticipation that conditions may change dramatically.

This special issue suggests that capriciousness typically precedes crises, which in turn motivate projects of control, both technoscientific and political, aimed at re-establishing order to unruly natures or peoples. Yet such projects do not resolve capriciousness; they redistribute it, often onto those already most vulnerable to its effects, while generating new knowledges in the process.

The contributions examine the interplay of this triad across colonial frontiers, industrial conflicts, and environmental crises spanning the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. Case studies range from Southern African weather knowledge to colonial botany in Calcutta, cacao disease in Trinidad, fireblight in New Zealand, cyclone management in the Bay of Bengal, astral knowledge in the early Americas, petroleum extraction in Galicia, management theory in the early twentieth-century US, and historiographical debates over the transition to capitalism. Together, they illuminate how perspective-dependent attributions of capriciousness generate crises that drive knowledge production, without ever finally taming the volatility that set them in motion.