International networks, and the Portuguese community of historians of science and technology

5Despite Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent’s wide-ranging contacts with the community of historians of science and technology working in the various Portuguese universities, we dare say that her relationship with some of the members of the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT – Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e Tecnologia) has been perhaps closer and more attentive, pre-dating the creation of this research unit.4

6CIUHCT was founded in 2007, resulting from the fusion of two research units; one associated with the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon and the other with NOVA School of Science and Technology. CIUHCT soon became the leading Portuguese unit in the history and material culture of science, technology, and medicine (HSTM) in Europe and the better positioned in Portugal to entertain a permanent dialogue with foreign scholars both in Europe and the USA.

7To assert HSTM in Portugal and to be a player at the international level, CIUHCT’s scientific agenda is guided by four main scientific goals: 1) to inscribe HSTM in the history of Portugal and the history of Europe, by unveiling the importance of HSTM in the construction of Europe; 2) to increase the presence of Portuguese HSTM studies in the international map of the discipline; 3) to foster a transdisciplinary STM approach, by bringing together scholars of different areas; and 4) to address contemporary issues through HSTM lenses, by using history, material culture, and public understanding as the basis for policymaking, and as a showcase for European citizenship and identity building. These goals are anchored in CIUHCT’s structure, which has evolved throughout these first 15 years and is currently organised in two thematically oriented groups: “Instruments and Practices, Material and Visual Cultures” and “Experts, Institutions and Globalisation”.

8To this end, CIUHCT’s agenda has been decisively influenced by two main networks, Science and Technology in the European Periphery (STEP), in which Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent participated, and Tensions of Europe [ToE]).5

9The international network STEP was active from 1999 to 2014. It aimed to study the circulation of science and technology within Europe involving actors from the so-called European peripheries in such a way as to overcome the constraints of local contexts often heavily tinted by positivist approaches, avoid the dangers of parochial perspectives, solve the problem of fragmentation produced by a myriad of local studies, and at the same time explore ways to tie research endeavours with mainstream historiography. By using different methodologies to discuss a variety of topics, ranging from travels, textbooks, popularisation of science and technology, science and technology in the press, national historiographies of science, science and religion, the role of universities, transnational histories, science and gender, etc., a new historiography of science and technology in the European periphery has emerged.6

10By criticising the value-ladenness associated with the centre-periphery dichotomy and the assumptions behind diffusionist models, a historiography of transmission gave way to a new historiography built on the concept of appropriation. This concept stems from cultural history and draws attention to the specificities of the “receiving” culture, with its social, political, religious and cultural peculiarities and options. By acknowledging that local agents are endowed with creative functions, a special emphasis is given to the ways practices are transformed when they move from one place to the other. Furthermore, appropriation values the fact that when practices “arrive” at a certain place, they are never integrated into an ideological vacuum. On the contrary, they are articulated within the multiple cultural traditions of a specific society at a particular moment of its history. New scientific discourses appear in the local context, together with the design of legitimising strategies, and the creation of new spaces for the practice of science, technology and medicine, while resistance to the new practices often emerges simultaneously. In this multiform and selective ways, the local “peripheral” context chooses to be influenced, and choices are taken simultaneously with the rejection of various forms of influence.

11A historiography of appropriation aims at unravelling the particularities and contours of appropriation processes taking place in different peripheral contexts, in different periods and for different thematic situations. By emphasising various and multidirectional responses, the international historical scene has been enriched with a variety of new case-studies, which have widened current views and often revised received ones. STEP therefore challenged the traditional narratives on science and technology by historicising the notion of “European Periphery”, reinforcing the concept of co-construction of moving (in time and space) centers and peripheries,7 and bringing to the forefront the perspective of active receivers often dismissed from global accounts based on a simplistic and static divide between the active Global North and the passive Global South.

12CIUHCT’s theoretical orientation was also deeply influenced by ToE research network, which coexisted in time with STEP (1999 to 2014). Despite their independence from each other, STEP and ToE had different albeit complementary approaches to the History of Science and Technology, both encouraging national case-studies and their relation to a larger regional, transnational and/or European framework.

13ToE discussed the role of technology as part of the building of European identity(ies) by approaching the concept of Europe using two main conceptual tools: the role of science and technology as integrative, albeit often hidden, actors in the building of Europe and the notions of linking and delinking to explore the ever-changing asymmetries within Europe and between Europe and the global world.8 The focus on global acts as the counterweight for the more traditional unit of analysis—the nation state—confronting political borders and transnational infrastructures, and discussing integration and fragmentation as two sides of the same ongoing process.

14Inspired by the theoretical frameworks of both networks, the community of Portuguese historians of science and technology belonging to CIUHCT has framed the study of science and technology in Portugal by analysing the dynamic relationships of Portuguese actors (scientists, engineers, agents from various profiles, etc.) among themselves and with actors of other countries (European or otherwise). A multitude of topics have been addressed in this context: the role of scientific, engineering, and medical expertise in the Portuguese management and exploitation of the overseas territories in Africa from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1970s (Portugal was a small peripheral European country, which acted towards its huge overseas empire as the central metropolis); how both science and technology have informed successive political agendas and have been used as tools (often forgotten yet extremely powerful) of the former Portuguese Empire; the role played by travels, circulation, and networking; the writing of books, textbooks, papers and the exchange of correspondence; the creation of scientific and technical institutions; the material vehicles used for the communication of science and technology in a country with a largely illiterate population and the images of science and technology they conveyed.9

15At the heart of this recentering of Portuguese history of science and technology is the shifting from the concept of transmission to the one of appropriation, from the perspective of the centre to the perspective of the periphery and from the isolated study of the periphery to comparative assessments, and the realisation that there is not one Europe, but rather a multiplicity of Europes that interact in different geometries of power (thus creating both consensus and tensions) that change over time. More recently, they have been exploring ways to reappraise the recent historiography of circulation, by focusing on the associated notions of exchanges, displacements, and translations, not only as a way of mobilising knowledge but also as a way of producing it, on the notion of locality as not necessarily coincident or constrained by location, and on how closely scrutinising the relations between purported centres and peripheries will give way to a much more nuanced picture of circulation within networks of evolving flexible geometries in which centers and peripheries are evolving entities.10

16In sum, appropriation, circulation, and innovation were adopted by CIUHCT as historiographical concepts to meet its objectives, to encompass the expertise already available in the research unit, to bring new insights into HSTM topics, and to provide additional scholarship on European identity in a global context. In fact, CIUHCT’s multiple disciplinary expertise encompasses a wide range of approaches, by using both human (experts and networks) and nonhuman actors (institutions, books, instruments, collections, spaces of STM production of knowledge and practices) in an extended timeframe (from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century) and in a diversified geography (Portugal and its former empire in a worldwide arena). By bringing together in the same research unit and under the same conceptual umbrella an array of diversified topics, CIUHCT became the hub for new perspectives on the role of STM in a globalised world. A more recent association with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Max Plank Institute for the History of Science’s programme on the Anthropocene Curriculum reinforced CIUHCT’s interest and active engagement in contemporary topics, creating an extra space for inter- and transdisciplinary research agendas and actions.

Prospects on the role of HSTM in present-day societal challenges

17Certainly, one of the main challenges faced by the Portuguese community of historians of science, technology and medicine is to sustain the blows caused by the repercussions of multiple international crises and the political choices of the local governmental ministries and agencies concerned with higher education and research. The cascade of successive difficulties deriving from the sanitary, economic, and environmental situations, as well as more recently the Ukraine war crisis have negatively impacted the world and naturally has had reverberations in Portugal, consequently affecting the local community of historians of science, technology and medicine. In addition, the implementation in the last decade of a business-style model of university has entailed an attack on the humanities and the social sciences, often deemed irrelevant as allegedly incapable of generating revenue.

18Despite this difficult context, we believe that as historians of science and technology, understanding and reflecting in the longue durée perspective on the role of science and technology as part of society and culture and as the result of human agency is critical to shedding light on contemporary challenges.11 It is at the crossroad of STEP’s, ToE’s agendas and their conceptual frameworks that we address two topics—crises and the Anthropocene—as privileged future research areas at CIUHCT, and more generally among topics for historians of science and technology. In our opinion, they are critical to better understand present-day society and challenges, and propose active agendas that may influence public opinion and policy makers, thereby showing the relevance of social sciences and humanities.12

19We further assert that both conceptual debate and archival research promise exciting results and show how humanities—in this case history of science and technology—may be relevant assets in the discussion of topics—such as resources, migrations, security, urban challenges, mobility, and the environment—usually labelled as political or economic and in proposing solutions to citizens and policy makers.13

20The rhetoric of and discourses on crises are rooted in a wider sense of loss and frustration very much based on the perception that human ability to command nature does not lead necessarily to increasing well-being, and that resources are indeed finite. Of course, this is not new concerning academic discussions among historians, philosophers and sociologists of science and technology, balancing between technophilia and technophobia, and the down-to-earth experience that trade-offs have always been part of the relationship between humans, nature and technology. However, the idea of linear, continuous, and “good” growth and progress, which is at the heart of industrial capitalism is still a doxa, in the sense that for most people this constructed vision appears to be the only possible vision of reality. The growing evidence that this narrative does not match reality creates a civilisational instability that finds its natural habitat in a series of never-ending slow-moving crises, in a “rolling apocalypse.”14 We have been exploring Rosalind William’s notions in examples stemming from the urban history of science and technology, and specifically in the response of Lisbon to incoming epidemics at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century,15 and we claim that they should be further investigated.

21The second topic—how to address the Anthropocene predicament and its relevance as a historical category—is closely related to the concept of crisis. Again, as historians, philosophers and sociologists of science and technology it is our responsibility to encourage an historicised account of the Anthropocene by following the changes in natural and human landscapes through the use of science and technology as a dispositif, i.e. a heterogeneous ensemble of mechanisms that enforce and reinforce power over nature (creating what we, the “Portuguese group,” has defined as a lumpennature),16 framed by economic and political objectives.

22By crossing concepts such as crisis and the Anthropocene with the theoretical frameworks of both STEP and ToE, historians of science and technology are endowed with tools which enabled them to historicise these concepts and endow them with new (or at least until now obscured) dimensions. The relevance of local contexts, transnational expertise and objects, colonialism, and imperialism are just a few examples of other topics worthy of reappraisals. Addressed from a new perspective centred on Europe, but deeply critical of Eurocentrism, the consideration of the dynamic evolution of extended global networks enables to relocate on new grounds the building of local asymmetries and their impact on present problems, in order to stress the urgent need for solutions calling for an ample participation of various constituencies.

23Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent accompanied us during a significant part of this long path toward the consolidation of a community of historians of science, technology and medicine in Portugal and its integration in international research networks. The rigour of her historical work combined with a constant attention to the challenges of the present, including those of academic ethics, are an inspiration that will certainly continue to be cherished by younger researchers and by future generations who will pursue work in our area of expertise.