The Working Group on the History of Race and Eugenics (HRE) at Oxford Brookes University; the Department for the History of Medicine at the Medical University of Vienna; and the University of Vienna’s Institute for Contemporary History. The workshop is organised with generous financial support from the Magistrate of Vienna, “Kulturabteilung der Stadt Wien”, MA 7.
International Workshop: Networking the Past: Historical Network Analysis, Eugenics and Biopolitics in the 20th Century
Date: 14-16 April 2010
Location: The Department for the History of Medicine at the Medical University of Vienna; and the University of Vienna’s Institute for Contemporary History.
Deadline for submission is 30 August 2009
Network approaches and methods of analyzing networks become more and more popular in the social sciences. Network analysis, as for example the social network analysis (SNA), does not focus on actors solely, but on the relations between them. SNA reveals social structures that are based on individual choices of possible and active connections as well as the positions of actors within the network thus indicating their control of information, knowledge, political support and power.
What is largely missing from current scholarship is the discussion of how the visualization of networks, and the methods of appropriately analyzing these, can yield different or divergent conclusions on historical and scientific debates during the twentieth century.
This workshop’s organisers are particularly interested in applying the method of network analysis to the international proliferation and local adaption of eugenic and biopolitical ideologies and means. We welcome the submission of paper proposals that focus on scientific and popular scientific discourses and practices that were meant to improve, reorganize and manage a certain population, social group or race – such as eugenics, population science, the anthropological and racial sciences, human genetics, reproductive medicine, public health and welfare administration, or genetic counselling throughout the 20th century. Contributions focusing on gender studies are especially welcome.
Scholars are invited to engage with the following questions:
A) Methodology: conceptual and empirical methods of analysing national and trans-national networks and their internal dynamics
- Epistemology: visualization, synchronicity of views, training of views, interpretation of network presentations, network borders, actor-network-theory
- Data issues: data selection, collection, processing, sources, missing data, reduction: “from words to numbers”, content analysis
B) Empirical studies on eugenics and biopolitics using network approaches
Applying concepts of networks and/or social network analysis to historical studies of eugenics and biopolitics considering professionalization, correspondence networks, scientific communities, affiliation networks (e.g. institutional ties), co-authorship, scientific discourses and semantic networks.
We invite proposals that include abstracts of no more than 400 words and a brief CV.
Deadline for submission is 30 August 2009.
Successful applicants will be informed by 15 September 2009.
Submission and draft papers should be sent to following e-mail address: thomas.mayer#univie.ac.at
We intend to publish the contributions to the workshop in an edited volume.
For further information please visit our websites at:
http://ah.brookes.ac.uk/research/project/hre/
http://www.meduniwien.ac.at/histmed/
https://www.univie.ac.at/wmg/
http://www.plattform-eugenik.at/
Source: veranstaltungen.zeitgeschichte@lists.univie.ac.at