WE ARE HIRING

Subject: PhD vacancy : 4-year PhD position in the history of science

The History of Science Institute (iHC) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona welcomes applications from PhD students for a fully-funded, four-year doctoral fellowship in the context of the project “Exchange Zones of Epistemic Resistance and Alternative Innovation: Activism, Grassroots Movements and Expertise, 1970s-1990s” (PID2023-150413NB-C21, funded by the Spanish State Research Agency). This project will delve on the exchange zones between activists, grassroots groups and experts in the Iberian Peninsula during the last decades of the 20th century, in three main areas: 1. Environment, energy and communities; 2. Body, gender and identities; 3. The city, mobility and urban sustainability.

The selected candidate will join the PhD program in History of Science at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and become part of the research team of the project. In close collaboration with the principal investigator and the research team, the candidate will: develop a doctoral dissertation on a topic related to the project, help in the achievement of the expected results, present and publish publications, and help to organize and participate in conferences, workshops, seminars and outreach activities of the project.

Please feel free to share this PhD position with interested candidates in your networks.

Submission deadline: 14th October 2024.

 

Application form: https://seleccio.uab.cat/convocatoriesupac/convocatoria/show/2193706

Requirements: Master’s degree in history of science, or similar postgraduate degree 

Main documents: 1. Short CV form: CVA_Candidate.docx (form, below); 2. PhD research project proposal (1,500 words) (in Supplementary Documents, in the form).

Evaluation: 1. CV (0-50 points): Scientific contributions (up to 45 points); Stays abroad / Internationalization (up to 5 points); 2. PhD project / Suitability for the general project (0-50 points)

UAB information about evaluation and employment conditions (in Catalan and Spanish): https://tauler.seu.cat/pagDetall.do?idEdicte=520319&idens=11 (project budget: €125.200)

More info: jaume.valentines.alvarez@uab.cat

 

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Description of the project

Exchange Zones of Epistemic Resistance and Alternative Innovation: Activism, Grassroots Movements and Expertise, 1970s-1990s

This project will delve on the highly significant exchange zones between activists, grassroots groups and experts in the Iberian Peninsula during the last decades of the 20th century. Looking at them allows us to understand in a deeper historical perspective key current scientific debates that are strongly shaped by lay actors, such as green transitions, pandemics, gender identities and AI. The project will draw on the theoretical framework of the coordinated project and will focus specifically on two intertwined domains:

1) Activism as an epistemologically active actor. Like users, consumers, patients, civic organizations and citizens exposed to envirotechnical risks, activist movements have played a decisive active role in the co-production of scientific knowledge and technological artifacts. When contesting specific innovations and scientific programs, activists have deployed a rich repertoire of epistemic resistance. As part of their local practices and transnational networks, the circulation of scientific knowledge has been crucial to their demands and arguments. In particular, scientific knowledge has often been appropriated in the making of what has been called activist knowledge and green knowledge, which, in turn, has been appropriated by (and shaped) technoscience. Alongside experts, activists have constituted exchange zones bridging different knowledge and standpoints, different political and epistemic practices, and different scientific languages and dreamscapes. In this sense, these exchange zones of epistemic resistance shed light on the multi-directional, multi-scale dimension of the co-production of science and society.

2) Activism as a driving force of sociotechnical innovation. Economic historians have treated resistance as an external factor (and an independent variable) which has to take into account when writing the complex equation explaining technological choice. However, there is no comprehensive framework to understand these processes in the perspective of the history of science. Scholars like S. Jasanoff and J.-P. Gaudillière have shown the multiplicity of efforts required to introduce a new artifact in society and authors such as D. Edgerton have reminded us that without present or imaginable alternatives, no activist resistance is understandable. Of course, not all the activist protests against science and technology have led to scientific endeavors and innovative technologies. Nonetheless, social opposition to specific scientific and technological projects does have often triggered a fair amount of ingenuity and innovation. The heterogeneous practices behind what is labeled as Civic Science, Street Science and Citizen science are closely related to alternative pathways of doing science. By bringing together several previous national and international projects of the researchers converge, this project will focus on the socially blurred epistemic zones where activists exchange knowledge, face scientific ignorance and produce epistemic tools for political purposes on a wide range of scales. In particular, the project will address three broad themes as main research lines: The environment; The city; and The body. All these lines will be articulated with the following intersecting dimensions: Invisibilized actors; Cognitive emotions; Socio-technical imaginaries; and Transnational perspectives.

 

Expected results of the project

The overall coordinated project (in collaboration with the University of Valencia) will contribute to strengthening the academic research lines of the project members and enriching the academic historiography on the circulation of knowledge and the social construction of expertise and lay expertise. The concept of "exchange zones" will allow to shed light on the historical interactions between the university, the industry, activists, and the public. The study of these interactions, in turn, is important for understanding, from a historical perspective, key global scientific debates that are strongly shaped today by lay actors, such as green transitions, circular economies, gender identities and AI. On the other hand, the team members will use the material and online platforms of their institutions to promote digital humanities resources and outreach activities, such as: Toxic Bios Oral Testimonies Data-Base, The Open-Access Environmentalist Heritage Catalog, The Iberian Heritage Map on Scientific Activism, Community Workshops and the series Debates on Science, Technology and Medicine in the Square. This will facilitate the promotion of the project's results in both the academic and public spheres and will contribute to create new exchange zones bringing historians, scientists, activists and communities together. In addition, the project plans to produce new historical sources through oral history work and to identify existing archive materials of lay actors and activist organizations.

The project will also result in top international peer-reviewed publications in different fields, especially history of science, environmental history and social history. The team members will publish more than 25 articles in indexed and non-indexed journals (mostly in indexed top-ranking journals), 12 book chapters and 5 books, one of which will be the first Spanish volume of the series Cycling Cities: The Global Experience, a research and publication project that covers 100 years of cycling policy and practice around the world in 50 cities in 25 countries and is a resource for studying (and creating) exchange zones between policymakers, community groups, students and other social actors. Following the new regulation of the UAB, most of the papers will be accessible in the university repository. The international network of the project group (strengthened thanks to the transnational dimension of the project and the integration of new members, with a long research career in European countries such as Sweden, Switzerland and Portugal) will have a very positive impact in the internationalization of the project. The proposed meetings to discuss the co-construction of activism and science and to articulate the 3 subprojects research lines will count with the participation of internationally-renowned invited scholars as a strategy for impacting in other international research agendas.

Besides, we have planned two meetings dealing with the interaction between activists and engaged experts in the regulation and production of technoscience which will take place in Barcelona and Valencia respectively in the second and third year of the project. These meetings will serve as a basis to prepare collective publications in the form of a book and a special issue in a journal of international impact. This work will also be complemented by the organization of an international congress in 2028 focused on technoscientific activisms with which we will produce a reference book in this field.