Entangled Science? Relocating German-Polish Scientific Relations

International Conference of the Cooperation Initiative of the Leibniz Association and the Polish Academy of Sciences: "Cross-border Scientific Dialogue. Potentials and Challenges for the Human and the Social Sciences", in cooperation with Ludwik and Alexander Birkenmajer Institute for the History of Science

Date: 28-30 October 2015

Venue: The Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe – Institute of the Leibniz Association, Gisonenweg 5-7, 35037 Marburg

Conference committee: Marcin Dolecki, Maciej Gorny, Gregor Feindt, Peter Haslinger, Adam Kozuchowski, Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen, Piotr Madajczyk, Ewa Manikowska, Thomas Strobel, Jan Surman, Leszek Zasztowt

Local Organizer: Jan Surman (jan.surman@herder-institut.de)

Research of transfers and entanglements has been a vital field of inquiry in history of science for several decades. Various studies have highlighted the role of contacts across languages and questioned the cultural and power dichotomies proposing terms like transculturality, pluriculturality or appropriation as most adequate for research on entangled spaces.

Our conference follows this direction of critical inquiry enlarging it to Central European space revising the contacts and intersections that one usually calls German-Polish. It seeks for alternative ways to tell the stories of scholarly entanglements in the space shaped by power inequalities, imperialism and nationalisms. In particular, we aim at questioning the widespread center-periphery dependence, which has implicitly and often explicitly dominated the approaches to research thus far. By choosing the perspective on entanglements, we also consciously argue against “methodical nationalism” highlighting pluricultural multilingual space as the primary object of our inquiry.