2018 ISRF Annual Workshop: Relating Pasts & Presents - History of Science & Social Science

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w o r k s h o p

2018

Relating Pasts & Presents History of Science & Social Science

26th - 28th September 2018 Harnack-Haus, Berlin

RELATING PASTS & PRESENTS History of Science & Social Science The Workshop takes up a line of thought emerging from last year’s ‘Today’s Futures’ theme, reported on in the Autumn Bulletin; to plan intelligently for the future we need to pay attention to the past. But what happens when social scientists and historians meet and talk? Historians of knowledge at MPIWG and social scientists funded by the ISRF share a critical view of knowledge.

Historians insist that what counts as knowledge and how it is produced and exercised, has been different at different times. Among social scientists, the anthropologist will remind us that this difference exists, too, in different places and cultures, while the critically-minded political scientist will point to the to the effects of power on forms of knowing. All this, as the philosopher of science will suggest, entails that it will be different again in the future. What follows for the critical social scientist, generically, is that manifestly it needs to be constantly under review in the present; reflexivity is part of social science’s methodology.

Is knowledge then in a perpetual state of ‘crisis’? Here, a number of questions arise. The critical historian, the philosopher, the critical theorist, will ask, ‘what is ‘crisis’, anyway?’ The historian will challenge the univocity of the term and point to different usages informing different practices at different times, the philosopher will note the continuity in change that is the historian’s presupposition. We can pose the ‘anthropologist’s question’: if there is a present ‘crisis of knowledge’ is it a new problem, or a ‘new-old’ problem?

The ISRF aims to support research which is interdisciplinary and reflexively critical, and seeks new theories and methods for understanding the conditions of life as it is lived by human beings now.

With a format of short research presentations, thematic discussions, dialogues across disciplines, and participants’ creative responses, the Workshop aims at a wide-ranging exploration of how a sensibility to the history of knowledge might inspire thinking in social science and how critical approaches in social science might speak to the historian.

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WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS Edna Bonhomme

MPIWG Postdoctoral Fellow

Edna Bonhomme is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science. She was trained as a biologist at Reed College, public health practitioner at Columbia University, and historian at Princeton University (MA, PhD). Her dissertation titled, “Plague Bodies and Spaces: Medicine, Trade, and Death in Ottoman Egypt, 1705-1830 CE,” examined the commercial and geopolitical trajectory of plague and its direct links to commercial, provincial, and imperial policies in several North African port cities. Her other research focuses on the intersection of medicine, migration, trade, and imperialism. Her current book project entitled, Ports and Pestilence in Alexandria, Tripoli, and Tunis, examines how ports functioned as a laboratory for framing epidemics, migration, and borders during the ‘long’ nineteenth century. In addition to her academic interests, she has written for Contretemps, Counterpunch, Der Freitag, Jacobin Magazine, Mada Masr, and Viewpoint Magazine. Website: https://www.ednabonhomme.com/

Louise Braddock

ISRF Director of Research

Dr Louise Braddock is the Director of Research at the ISRF. She works with the ISRF’s Foundation Board to direct all academic work within the Foundation, in consultation with its Academic Advisors. She proposes, implements and assesses the Foundation’s funding strategy and activities.

She trained as a psychiatrist, and now researches and publishes on the philosophy of psychoanalysis. She has taught philosophy in Cambridge, and in Oxford where she is an associate member of the Philosophy Faculty and co-convenes the St John’s College (Oxford) Interdisciplinar y Psychoanalysis seminar (oxfordpsychoanalysis. blogspot.co.uk). She is an academic associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

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Matt Burch

ISRF Early Career Fellow 2018-19

Matt Burch is a lecturer in the School of Philosophy and Art History at the University of Essex. He has a PhD in philosophy and an MSc in Behavioural Economics, and he works on issues at the intersection of phenomenology, action theory, and research in the cognitive and social sciences.

At the moment, his research is focused in particular on the stance of objectivity in legal contexts, the breakdown of agency in everyday life, and, the topic of his ISRF grant, the issue of risk in the care professions. His research on risk is an outgrowth of his work on several projects with the Essex Autonomy Project (EAP), including an AHRC-funded project on the compliance of the Mental Capacity Act (2005) and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the Wellcome Trust-funded Mental Health and Justice project.

His ISRF project aims to bridge a gap between our theoretical tools for conceptualizing risk and the practical decisions about risk made in today’s care professions. The dominant paradigm in today’s discourse on risk stems from decision theory. This discipline has developed excellent mathematical tools for decision-making under risk. However, these tools, as any expert will attest, are only powerful predictors of risk under certain conditions—conditions almost never met in care work (Pecora et al. 2013). Care workers are not like insurance actuaries setting policy prices. They work collaboratively with individuals to solve specific, ethically complex problems in environments where the accurate statistical forecasting of risk is not a real possibility. Care workers thus need an approach to risk designed to fit their actual practice, and Matt’s project aims to develop such an approach. To do so, he will use the tools of philosophy to bring the discourse of risk back in touch with the human condition, and he will draw on social science methods to collaborate with care workers in order to develop an approach to risk fit-to-purpose for the care professions.

Catherine Charrett ISRF Early Career Fellow 2018 Dr. Catherine Charrett is a lecturer of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London.

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Catherine completed her PhD at Aberystwyth University, where she researched EU-Hamas relations following the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. Catherine’s has conducted extensive fieldwork in Palestine and Brussels, and she explores how ritualised practices are performative of diplomatic relations. Her work uses interdisciplinary methodologies informed by gender politics and performance studies and Catherine produced a performance piece entitled “Politics in Drag: Sipping Toffee with Hamas in Brussels.” Catherine completed her MSc from the London School of Economics and her BA from the University of British Columbia.

Catherine’s ISRF project investigates the networks that form around state security technologies in the European Union’s engagement with Israel and Palestine. Using a gendered based critique it observes how the circulation and joint development of different technologies are performative of different orders of masculinity and sovereignty. Catherine will conduct on-site empirical research and will develop a performance piece based on her findings. The performance piece will be shown in academic, theatre, policy and community spaces, allowing audiences to observe and engage with transformed uses of security technologies through the strategic practices of drag performance.

Beverley Clough ISRF Early Career Fellow 2018 Beverley Clough is a Lecturer in Law & Social Justice at the University of Leeds School of Law. She holds an LLB, an MA in Health Care Ethics & Law and a PhD in Bioethics & Medical Jurisprudence from the University of Manchester. Beverley has published on mental capacity law and relational theory, with a specific focus to date on informal carers, deprivation of liberty and capacity to consent to sex. She has also worked on issues surrounding older people, access to services and rights. She engages with feminist legal theory and critical disability studies to reflect on mental capacity law and social care.

Beverley’s project seeks to reinvigorate debates in mental capacity law, and disability more broadly, through interrogating the key concepts and binaries that currently frame and constrain

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legal analysis. This will be done through a critical exploration of the creation and maintenance of the contours of mental capacity law, with an eye to the norms and concepts which inform legal responses in practice, and the concrete consequences of these in terms of embodied experience. It seeks to expose what is obscured or hidden by the binary concepts that frame this area, as well as how recognising relationality and spatial dynamics can help to reconfigure the conceptual terrain. It will provide an important provocation in global debates surrounding the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) which has been hailed as ushering in a ‘paradigm shift’ in disability rights. This will not occur if we are constrained by the current boundaries of our legal approach.

Greg Constantine

ISRF Independent Scholar Fellow 2018-19

Greg Constantine is an American/Canadian documentary photographer based in SE Asia and the United States. He has dedicated his career to long-term, independent projects about underreported or neglected global stories. His work explores the intersection of human rights, inequality, injustice, identity, belonging and the power of the state. He spent over a decade working on the project Nowhere People, which documented the lives and struggles of stateless communities in nineteen countries around the world.

He is the author of three books including: Kenya’s Nubians: Then & Now (2011), Exiled To Nowhere: Burma’s Rohingya (2012), which was named a 2012 Notable Photo Book of the year by Photo District News Magazine (US) and the Independent on Sunday (UK), and the book Nowhere People (2015) which was recognized as one of the Top Ten Photo Books of 2015 by Mother Jones Magazine in the US. Exhibitions of his work have been shown in over 40 cities worldwide including: Palais des Nations in Geneva, European Parliament in Brussels, Saatchi Gallery in London, Customs House in Sydney, Kenya National Museum in Nairobi, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and US Senate Rotunda in Washington DC and at the UN Headquarters in NYC. Exhibitions have also been shown in

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Budapest, Kiev, Rome, Madrid, Perpignan, Bangkok, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Tokyo, Phnom Penh and Yangon. In 2014, his work was exhibited at the Peace Palace in The Hague during the 1st Global Forum on Statelessness.

In late 2016, he earned his Ph.D. from Middlesex University in the UK. He was a 2015 Distinguished Visiting Fellow with the International State Crime Initiative at Queen Mary University of London and a 2017 Artist in Residence of Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, Canada.

Since early 2006, he has been documenting the persecution of the stateless Rohingya community from Myanmar (Burma). Constantine will use his ISRF Fellowship to build on a successful track record of previous research and practical field experience in Burma and neighbouring Bangladesh from 2006 to 2017. The research will take an interdisciplinary approach and will develop along a number of lines, interweaving the thematic strands of genocide, ‘slow violence’, visual storytelling, statelessness, forced displacement and health destruction. The project and research aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the complex roots, dynamics and diverse experiences of atrocities related to displacement, deprivation of nationality and the destruction of access to healthcare as contributors to the genocidal process toward the Rohingya community in Myanmar.

Paul Dobraszcyk

ISRF Independent Scholar Fellow 2016

Paul is a researcher and writer based in Manchester, UK, and a teaching fellow at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. He is currently completing a book Future Cities, Architecture and the Imagination (Reaktion, 2019) and also an edited collection Manchester, in Other Words.

He is the author of The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay (IB Tauris, 2017); London’s Sewers (Shire, 2014); Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain (Ashgate, 2014); and Into the Belly of the Beast: Exploring London’s Victorian Sewers (Spire, 2009); and co-editor of Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within (Reaktion, 2016); and Function & Fantasy: Iron Architecture in Long Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2016).

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His writing research interests broadly cover visual culture and the built environment from the 19th century onwards, with particular interests in Manchester, urban futures, underground spaces and ruins, print culture, and industrial architecture. He has published many articles on such diverse topics as ornament and iron, the ruins of Chernobyl, neo-Victorian horror cinema, gardening catalogues, census forms, London guidebooks, sewage pumping stations and information for cab passengers. He is also a visual artist and photographer.

Dave Elder-Vass

ISRF Political Economy Fellow 2017-18

Dave is a Reader in Sociology at Loughborough University. His early work, notably in his books The Causal Power of Social Structures and The Reality of Social Construction, addressed broad questions in social ontology and social theory, arguing for a realist – but also constructionist – ontology of the social world. More recently, he has brought this perspective to bear on issues in economic sociology, beginning with the role and nature of gifts. His most recent book, Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy, develops a realist political economy of practices and uses it to analyse the economic structures of some of the best-known organisations in the contemporary digital economy.

His ISRF Political Economy Research Fellowship project is concerned with the construction of value in the finance sector. As the global financial crisis has demonstrated, market-oriented theories of financial asset values are bankrupt. This project aims to develop and apply an alternative theory, arguing that the value of assets like money, shares, and derivatives is socially constructed: demand for financial instruments is created by narratives that generate expectations of future value, by institutions that bolster these expectations, and by persuading other financial actors to accept them as facts. While such values are often stabilised, they are potentially highly precarious, generating massive risk for our economic system. A clearer understanding of how that risk is generated can help us to develop a finance sector that prioritises social benefit rather than private profit regardless of the consequences.

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Building on Dave’s earlier work on social ontology, the project will use publicly available evidence to examine three cases that exemplify the argument: venture capital investments, the digital currency Bitcoin, and the complex derivatives that sparked the 2008 financial crisis. In employing tools from the philosophy of critical realism and the sociology of social construction, the project breaks with existing frameworks for explaining economic phenomena. Instead it develops the approach introduced in Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy which argues that we can understand the economy best as the site of many interacting complexes of practices. This is a framework that allows us to integrate insights from multiple disciplines including economics itself but positions conventional market theory as a description of only one of the many mechanisms that influence economic events.

Sebastian Felten MPIWG Research Fellow Sebastian Felten is a Research Fellow at the MPIWG. His current work is focussed on Central German mining as a site of highly charged exchange between the emerging earth and technical sciences and state administrations that had their own protocols for knowledge production and use. Central to this investigation are questions regarding unequal relationships within this knowledge economy: Which observations counted as reliable data? How were relevant experiences stored and reactivated for later use? Whose expertise was valued, and whose rejected? By comparing and contrasting commercial, scientific and administrative ‘fact-keeping,’ this project contributes to a broadening discussion about the ways in which individuals and groups used information technology — paper-based or otherwise – to engage with a complex social and natural environment.

Sebastian’s project builds on a study of historical accounting practices carried out as part of his PhD at King’s College, London (“Unlikely Circuits: General Monetisation of a European Rural Society, c. 1700-1900,” supervised by Anne Goldgar and Francisco Bethencourt).

Sebastian has also worked for the German Historical Institute (GHI) in London as part of the

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digital edition project “Pauper Letters and Petitions for Poor Relief in Germany and Great Britain, 1770–1914,” where he supervised the transcription and input of metadata, liaised between IT and researchers, designed the user interface with the programmer, and developed a keen interest in Digital Humanities.

Julien-François Gerber

ISRF Political Economy Fellow 2018

Julien-François Gerber is an Assistant Professor at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. Before that, he was a faculty member in Bhutan, in India, and a visiting fellow at Harvard University. He holds a PhD from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He works on the relationships between economic systems, ecological (un)sustainability, and the conditions for flourishing, alienation and resistance. He has published on the expansion of capitalism in the rural sphere, the property-credit nexus, popular environmentalism, (de)commodification, and post-growth/degrowth.

His ISRF project explores the nature of social movements against indebtedness and extractivism.

Both phenomena have reached unparalleled levels worldwide. They are intimately linked with the growth-addiction of neoliberal capitalism, which relentlessly seeks new accumulation opportunities – both virtual (financial) and spatial (as in mining, logging and planting). Indebtedness and extractivism are also generating an increasing amount of resistance movements. How do these movements differ from ‘older’ economic conflicts such as land or labour struggles and to what extent do they embody ‘post-growth’ alternatives? The approach consists of analysing the largest possible number of case studies available in the literature. As very little research has been done on anti-debt movements, a new database will have to be compiled. In contrast, antiextractive conflicts have been extensively documented but relatively poorly theorised.

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Jill Gibbon

ISRF Early Career Fellow 2017-18

Jill Gibbon is a senior lecturer in Graphic Arts at Leeds Beckett University. She holds a B.A from Leeds Polytechnic, an M.A from Keele University, and a PhD from Wimbledon School of Art, the University of Surrey. She has published on art as an interdisciplinary method in War Studies and has drawings in the permanent collections of the Imperial War Museum and the Bradford Peace Museum.

Her ISRF project uses drawing to explore the etiquette of the arms trade. The military and security industries are usually studied with reason-based methods. However, etiquette lies outside reason.

It is sensuous – enacted, performed and displayed. Jill has visited arms fairs covertly in Europe and the Middle East by dressing up as an arms trader, and once inside, she draws. She will use an archive of the drawings and other artefacts from the fairs to explore the rituals of dress, manners, and hospitality that legitimise and normalise the international trade in weapons.

Athena Hadji

ISRF Independent Scholar Fellow 2018-19

Dr. Athena Hadji is an academic (B.A., University of Athens, M.A. and Ph.D., UC Berkeley), contemporary art curator and a published and award-nominated author. She has taught Archaeology, Anthropology and History of Art in Greece and beyond for over a decade. Currently, she is working toward a contemporary art group show that will air in the Fall 2018. As an academic, she is the recipient of prestigious fellowships and awards from the Fulbright Foundation and the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, among others. As a curator she was selected for the NEON/ Whitechapel Gallery Curator Exchange Program, also her Summer 2017 contemporary art show was granted a NEON exhibition fund. As an author she has been shortlisted for two national awards and was granted a literary award from the Municipality of Rhodes for her latest novel The Sea Fled. She has collaborated with many cultural institutions and organizations. She has accepted invitations to lecture at selected institutions internationally. Dr. Hadji publishes extensively on art, archaeology, anthropology and beyond. She is co-editor of Space and Time

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in Mediterranean Prehistory (Routledge, 2013). Her most recent interdisciplinary contribution, linking Early Cycladic Art and the neurosciences appeared at Quaternary International in 2016.

Her fiction works include three published novels, short stories and literary criticism articles.

Chris Hann

Director, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Born and brought up in Wales, Chris Hann’s university education is from Oxford (BA 1974 in Politics, Philosophy and Economics) and Cambridge (PhD, Social Anthropology, 1979). He stayed on in Cambridge as a Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, and later became a lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology. Between 1992 and joining the Max Planck Society in 1999, Hann was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He retains the title Honorary Professor at Kent, and also at the Martin Luther University of HalleWittenberg and the University of Leipzig.

Chris’s main research interests date back to his undergraduate days and his first fieldwork projects in rural Hungary and Poland. I followed up with a comparative investigation of smallholders in a capitalist context on the Black Sea coast of Turkey (with Dr. Ildikó Bellér-Hann, nowadays based at the University of Copenhagen). His work on religion derives primarily from my encounter with the Greek Catholic minority in Poland, an interest that later expanded to eastern Christians in general.

After 2006 he resumed fieldwork in Xinjiang in the form of a contribution to the departmental Focus Group investigating social support and kinship in China and Vietnam (again jointly with Dr. Ildikó Bellér-Hann). He maintains strong interests in comparative economic organization, in part through collaborative projects with Catherine Alexander, Stephen Gudeman, Keith Hart, Don Kalb and Jonathan Parry. All of this work is designed to break down disciplinary boundaries and contribute to a better understanding of Eurasia in world history. The concept of Eurasia is the principal frame for all research in his Department.

Chris is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and an Ordentliches Mitglied of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. In 2015 he was awarded the Rivers Memorial Medal

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by the Royal Anthropological Institute. In 2019 he will be presented with the Huxley Medal by the same Institute.

Deana Heath ISRF Mid-Career Fellow 2017-18 Deana’s early research was comparative in scope; it aimed both to explore the cultural power of colonialism and the differing nature of colonialism in two different types of colonies (namely an ‘exploitation’ colony such as India and settler colonies such as Australia) and their imperial metropole (namely Britain). While her focus was primarily on cultural history – particularly attempts to regulate ‘obscene’ texts and images – she was also interested in how colonial states operated. Such interests drew her to the study of theories of power (particularly Foucault’s concept of governmentality), modernity and globalization. More recently, Deana has developed an interest in violence, particularly in the ways in which colonial regimes – especially in India – employed sovereign power, or the use of force, to enhance and maintain their authority, and the ways this intersected with other forms of power (including both governmentality and biopower).

She is particularly interested, moreover, in the impact of such forms of violence on Indian bodies and minds.

Deana will develop these interests further through her ISRF-funded project on state torture in colonial India.

Jessie Hohmann

ISRF Early Career Fellow 2017-18

Jessie Hohmann is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Queen Mary, University of London. She previously completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge, where she was also a British Academy PostDoctoral Research Fellow, and has degrees from the University of Sydney, Osgoode Hall Law School, and the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on the objects and materiality of international law, on human rights (particularly the right to housing), and on indigenous peoples

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in international law. She is a founding editor of the Queen Mary Human Rights Law Review, and Co-Director of the Queen Mary Centre for European and International Legal Affairs.

Jessie’s ISRF project seeks to open an innovative new theoretical and methodological direction for international legal scholarship, prompted by the question: what would be revealed if we began with things, and material objects, rather than with texts?

Material things fill our homes, our cities, our bodies, and we are surrounded by objects from the minute and ephemeral to the enduring and the enormous. Yet we seldom consider international law’s role in creating these objects; giving them force and authority; according them special or everyday status; or – on the other hand, stripping them of the authority to be, preventing their coming into being, or resulting in their destruction. From this perspective, our world is filled with objects of international law, and each of these material objects exists in a manner which is caught up with international law’s objects as purposes. In revealing the deep entanglements of international law and the material things around us, we can begin to understand how international law structures us as its subjects – and sets the contours for the possibilities and limits of our lives – through objects. This will enable new ways of thinking about, but also opportunities for contesting, resisting, and re-forming international law and its implications for our lived experience.

Rachael Kiddey

ISRF Academic Editor

Dr Rachael Kiddey joined the ISRF in 2014. As Academic Editor, Rachael’s priorities are editing the ISRF’s termly Bulletin, assisting the Director of Research in academic matters, and responsibility for commissioning and producing content for the website. Rachael’s role includes encouraging wide dissemination of research funded by the ISRF, for example through podcasts, popular articles and talks and the use of film.

Rachael is also postdoctoral researcher at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, where

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she works on a GCRF funded project called ‘Architectures of Displacement: The Experiences and Consequences of Emergency Shelter’. Her monograph, ‘Homeless Heritage’, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. Rachael will take up a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, in November 2018.

Adam Leaver

ISRF Political Economy Fellow 2017-18

Adam Leaver is Professor of Accounting and Society and Co-Director of SPERI. Prior to joining the University of Sheffield in 2017, Adam was Professor in Financialization and Management at the University of Manchester, and researcher at the Centre for Research In Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC).

His work is interdisciplinary, working at the intersect of critical accounting, political economy and management. He has published multiple co-authored books and articles on financialization and financial crisis and has a track record of publishing impactful public interest reports on financial sector reform.

Adam’s current research interests include i) using social network analysis methods to map the social relationships that underlie certain complex securities markets, ii) developing a relational theory of the firm to understand the impact of financialization in the corporate sphere, iii) exploring the inter-temporal transfers and tensions that arise as a consequence of financialization and iv) theorising the sociology of metric gaming in organisations.

Emanuele Lobina

ISRF Political Economy Fellow 2017-18

Emanuele Lobina is Principal Lecturer in the Public Services International Research Unit (PSIRU) at the University of Greenwich Business Faculty. Emanuele joined PSIRU in 1998 to further PSIRU’s research and policy work on water service reform. Taking the urban water sector in

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developed, transition and developing countries as reference, his research connects two separate but interrelated themes: the relative efficiency of public and private enterprise; and the policy process of water service reform. He has regularly acted as a consultant for and policy advisor to international organisations, central and local governments, professional associations, trade unions and social movements. His work has been translated into Catalan, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian. His experience with applied research has led Emanuele to growing dissatisfaction with the dominant rational choice theories of government failure, such as public choice and property rights theory, and competing perspectives such as market failure theory. In fact, the evidence does not support the predictions of all these theories. This dissatisfaction constitutes the motivation for Emanuele’s current theoretical work.

Tamar Novick

MPIWG Senior Research Scholar

Tamar Novick received her PhD from the History and Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014. Her dissertation explored the use of science and technology as means for erecting a mystical past in Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century. This project, now a manuscript entitled Milk & Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land examined how settlers who attributed special qualities to their land, used science and technology to reconstruct a plentiful mystical past, “a land flowing with milk and honey.” The study was organized around the creatures that became key actors in the making of a Holy Land: bees, cows, sheep, goats, and women, and analyzed the technologies used to produce modern plenty.

Before coming to the MPIWG, Tamar was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University. Her current research focuses on the use of bodily waste in biomedical research, and more specifically, on the role of urine in infertility research and treatments. Other projects deal with the issue of theft in the agricultural realm, and with early twentieth-century hunting expeditions and the construction of zoological collections in the Middle East. Her fields

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of expertise include history of technology, environmental history, cultural studies, and Middle East studies.

Oche Onazi ISRF Early Career Fellow 2018 Oche joined the University of Southampton in October 2016 as Lecturer in Law. He holds degrees from the Universities of Edinburgh (PhD), Warwick (LL.M in law in development) and Jos – Nigeria (LL.B hons). He is also a qualified (but non-practising) Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria.

Oche’s ISRF project aims to demonstrate the role that can be played by African legal theory or legal philosophy in forging and grounding a new response to exclusions suffered by Africans with disability as a matter of justice. The project is a response to the neglect of an African account of disability in African ethical, moral, social, legal and philosophical thought and more generally in the literature on disability justice. In doing so, the project explores how an African-inspired theory or philosophy of law can extend the reach of issues central to contemporary disability justice discourse and also shed new light on issues such as the meaning of disability itself, the nature of obligations owed to disabled persons and the type of institutional responses necessary to achieve the ideal of disability justice in Africa.

Martin O’Neill ISRF Mid-Career Fellow 2017-18 Martin O’Neill is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of York, having recently moved faculties from the Department of Politics. He works on a number of topics in moral and political philosophy. He is especially interested in equality, inequality and social justice; freedom and responsibility; and a number of issues at the intersection of political philosophy, public policy and political economy (including taxation, monetary policy, financial regulation, corporate governance, work, and labour unions). Martin’s work has been supported by grants

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from organisations including the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF), and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. He is a Commissioning Editor of Renewal: a Journal of Social Democracy.

Ohad Parnes

MPIWG Research Coordinator & Senior Research Scholar

Ohad Parnes is the Research Coordinator at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

He and studied Biology and History of Science at the Tel-Aviv University, obtaining his PhD in 2001 with a dissertation on nineteenth century physiology and medicine. He worked at the Open University in Israel, at the Central European University in Budapest, at the University of Berne and has been a Research Fellow at the Center of Cultural and Literary Research (ZfL) in Berlin and the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College in London. His main interests are the history of the life sciences and modern medicine, focusing on evolutionary theory and epigenetics as well as the history of immunology and autoimmunity and chronic disease in the twentieth century. Ohad’s current research project deals with his doctoral supervisor Yehuda Elkana’s estate and the digitalization of Theodor Schwann’s estate.

Jayne Raisborough

ISRF Academic Advisor

Jayne Raisborough is Professor of Media at the School of Cultural Studies and Humanities, Leeds Beckett University.

Jayne’s research broadly focuses on two questions: who can we be and how can we live in prevailing socio-economic contexts? These questions are explored across a range of journal articles and her most recent books: Lifestyle Media and the Formation of the Self (2011 Palgrave) and Fat Bodies, Health and the Media (2016 Palgrave). She has explored, published and taught on media/ cultural representations of social class, gender, ethical consumption, litter and more recently anti-ageing and women’s gun ownership. While these sites are diverse, they each

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represent specific manifestations of ‘responsiblised’ citizenship and allow insight into a cultural shaping of new subjectivities. She is interested in what is enabled and enacted through this responsiblization and shaping - particularly because these activities relate to prevailing neoliberal rationalities.

Jayne was awarded her PhD by Lancaster University in 2000, and arrived at the School of Applied Social Sciences, University of Brighton in 2004 after 10 years as Lecturer in Sociology at Liverpool Hope University College.

Jürgen Renn

MPIWG Director

Jürgen Renn, together with his group, researches structural changes in systems of knowledge.

The aim is to develop a theoretical understanding of knowledge evolution, taking into account its epistemic, social, and material dimensions. As groundwork for such a theoretical approach to the history of knowledge, he has been studying some of the great transformations of systems of physical knowledge, such as the origin of theoretical science in antiquity, the emergence of classical mechanics in the early modern period, and the revolutions of modern physics in the early twentieth century. In addition to this longitudinal perspective on the evolution of knowledge, he and his collaborators have developed a transversal approach, studying dissemination and transformation processes of knowledge across cultural boundaries.

He has been engaged from the very start in the Digital Humanities and the Open Access Movement. He is a co-initiator of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities launched by the MPG in 2003 and has created, together with his colleagues, the Edition Open Access platform for open access publication. He has also been responsible for numerous major exhibitions on the history of science, from Albert Einstein - Chief Engineer of the Universe to Archimede. Arte e scienza dell’invenzione.

Jürgen Renn is honorary professor for History of Science at both the Humboldt-Universität zu

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Berlin and the Freie Universität Berlin. He has taught at Boston University, at the ETH in Zurich, and at the University of Tel Aviv. He has held visiting positions in Vienna, Bergamo, Pavia, and at CalTech. He is a member of the Leopoldina as well as of further national and international scientific and editorial boards. In 2011 he won the Premio Anassilaos International. In 2014, he won the ESHS Neuenschwander Prize and the Premio Internazionale Marco & Alberto Ippolito and was awarded the Max Planck Communitas Award and the Francis Bacon Award. Jürgen Renn is currently serving as Chairperson of the Humanities Sciences Section of the Max Planck Society.

Giulia Rispoli MPIWG Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow Giulia Rispoli studied Philosophy at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” where she received her PhD in 2015, and at the Faculty of Arts of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. In 2015 and in 2016, she was Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre Alexander Koyré and at the Muséum national d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Over the last three years, Giulia has been Visiting Scholar at the MPIWG (Dep. II), at the Centre for Complex Systems Analysis at the University of York (UK), and at the National University of Science and Technology in Moscow. Giulia’s work has been mainly focused on the history of systems theories and cybernetics and on their application to the life sciences and ecology. In her MA thesis, published in 2012, she focused on the work of Russian Marxist Alexander A. Bogdanov and examined his General Science of Organization, Tektology (1913–1928). Giulia’s doctoral thesis, recently published in a co-authored book, brought into focus the development of biogeochemistry in twentieth-century Russia, and the idea of co-evolution between the biosphere and the cosmic environment.

Giulia’s current research deals with the history of biosphere studies and the emergence of the earth-system conception throughout the course of the twentieth century, and within the historical context of the Cold War. She explores how systems theory and cybernetics have shaped, and have been affected by, the development of global ecology—the discipline that investigates the role of humankind as an agent in the transformation of the planet.

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Day One 4:00pm 4:30pm

26th September Coffee & Registration Welcome - Louise Braddock ISRF Director of Research

SESSION ONE 4:45pm

Discussion: ’Knowledge and its Vicissitudes’ - Chair: Louise Braddock ISRF Director of Research - Chris Hann Director, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology - Jürgen Renn Director, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science - Martin Thomas Professor of History, University of Exeter

SESSION TWO 5:45pm

ISRF: Social Science Modalities - Chair: Rachael Kiddey ISRF Academic Editor - Illan Wall Associate Professor in Law, University of Warwick - Jill Gibbon Senior Lecturer in Graphic Arts, Leeds Beckett University - Greg Constantine Independent Scholar, Queen Mary, University of London - Athena Hadji Independent Scholar, Athens School of Fine Arts - Paul Dobraszczyk Teaching Fellow, Bartlett School of Architecture - Deana Heath Senior Lecturer in Indian and Colonial History, University of Liverpool - Catherine Charrett Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary, University of London

7:30pm - 9:00pm Buffet Reception

Day Two 9:00am

27th September Welcome & Coffee

SESSION THREE 9:15am

ISRF-MPIWG: Risk & Precarity - Chair: Hansjakob Ziemer MPIWG Head of Cooperation & Communication, Research Scholar - Matt Burch Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Essex - Beverley Clough Lecturer in Law, University of Leeds - Sebastian Felten MPIWG Research Scholar - Julien-Francois Gerber Assistant Professor of Environment and Development, Erasmus University Rotterdam - Oche Onazi Lecturer in Law, University of Southampton

10:30am 10:45am

Coffee Break ISRF-MPIWG: Risk & Precarity (cont.)

- Chair: Hansjakob Ziemer MPIWG Head of Cooperation & Communication, Research Scholar - Giulia Rispoli MPIWG Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow - Susanne Schmidt Postdoctoral Scholar, Freie Unviersität Berlin

SESSION FOUR 11:15am

ISRF-MPIWG: Organisation & Bureaucracy - Chair: Ohad Parnes MPIWG Research Coordinator & Senior Research Scholar - Edna Bonhomme MPIWG Postdoctoral Fellow - Jessie Hohmann Senior Lecturer in Law, Queen Mary, University of London - Tamar Novick MPIWG Senior Research Scholar

12:00pm 12:15am

Coffee Break ISRF-MPIWG: Organisation & Bureaucracy (cont.)

- Chair: Ohad Parnes MPIWG Research Coordinator & Senior Research Scholar - Alexander Stingl Independent Scholar, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme - Sherrill Stroschein Reader in Politics, University College London - Christine von Oertzen MPIWG Senior Research Scholar

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Day Two 1:00pm

27th September Lunch

SESSION FIVE 2:15pm

ISRF-MPIWG: ‘Pitches’ - Chair: Rachael Kiddey ISRF Academic Editor - Group 1: Matt Burch & Susanne Schmidt - Group 2: Edna Bonhomme, Julien-Francois Gerber & Giulia Rispoli - Group 3: Sebastian Felten & Jill Gibbon - Group 4: Catherine Charrett, Jessie Hohmann & Tamar Novick

3:15pm

Pitch Presentations

4:00pm

Coffee Break

SESSION SIX 4:30pm - 5:30pm Evaluation of Pitches - Chair: Louise Braddock ISRF Director of Research - Panel: Jayne Raisborough (ISRF Academic Advisor; Professor of Media, Leeds Beckett University), Anke Te Heesen (Professor of the History of Science, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Martin Thomas (Professor of History, University of Exeter) & Christine von Oertzen (MPIWG Senior Research Scholar)

Day Three 9:00am

28th September Welcome & Coffee

SESSION SEVEN 9:15am

ISRF: Political Economy - Chair: Chris Hann Director, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology - Dave Elder-Vass Lecturer in Sociology, Loughborough University - Adam Leaver Professor of Accounting and Society, University of Sheffield & Keir Martin Associate Professor in -

11:15am

Social Anthropology, University of Oslo Emanuele Lobina Principal Lecturer in Public Services International Research Unit, University of Greenwich Martin O’Neill Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy, University of York Gabor Scheiring Political Economy Research Fellow, University of Cambridge Joy White Visiting Lecturer, University of Roehampton

Coffee Break

SESSION EIGHT 11:30am

Emergent Themes: ISRF-MPIWG in Discussion with Audience - Chair: Louise Braddock ISRF Director of Research

1:00pm

Lunch

SESSION NINE 2:00pm

Panel Discussion: What Have We Learned?

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Louise Braddock ISRF Director of Research Rachael Kiddey ISRF Academic Editor Ohad Parnes MPIWG Research Coordinator & Senior Research Scholar Hansjakob Ziemer MPIWG Head of Cooperation & Communication, Research Scholar

3:30pm

Kaffee und Kuchen

4:00pm

ISRF Director of Research: Conclusion

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Gabor Scheiring

ISRF Political Economy Fellow 2018-19

Gabor Scheiring is currently a research associate at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge. Gabor is a multidisciplinary political economist combining theoretical innovation with empirical rigour benefitting from unconventional methodologies to reduce social hardships and to advance human development, health and democracy. Gabor regards social research as a tool that can help people make better sense of social dilemmas, understand the dynamics of social change and design solutions to real world problems.

As an economic sociologist he has published extensively on the political economy of health, the political economy of democratisation, and on the role of social movements in the policy process. In his doctoral research at the University of Cambridge he investigated the impact of deindustrialisation and privatisation on mortality and the collusion of class and identity in the everyday experience of the transition. In his doctoral dissertation Gabor carried out a multi-level empirical analysis of the socioeconomic factors behind the post-socialist mortality crisis of the early transition years in Hungary, the growing inequalities in mortality during the 2000s and the individual strategies of survival amongst increased stress in industrial towns.

Parallel to his studies Gabor was a nationally and internationally active member of NGOs during 2000s campaigning for sustainability and social rights. As co-founder of a local progressive green party he was elected to the Hungarian Parliament in 2010 and served as the shadow minister of finance for his party. From September 2014 he has been the Chairman of the Progressive Hungary Foundation. During his years of active involvement in oppositional politics in Hungary Gabor has witnessed the gradual erosion of democracy, as the ruling Fidesz party took control of an increasing number of social spheres. This led him to re-evaluate the transition policies followed prior to 2010 and question some of the assumptions of the theories of democratisation.

Institutional guarantees of freedom, even in a member state of the European Union, can be attacked and eroded quickly if they are built on a shaky socio-economic foundation. His research proposal submitted to the ISRF is built on this experience.

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Gabor proposes a new political economic framework for understanding illiberalism. Reorienting the scholarship on democratisation Gabor’s research uses Central and Eastern Europe as a strategic research site to analyse how the model of post-socialist dependent capitalism affected the chance of reaching democratic consolidation. His hypothesis is that the varying strength of illiberalism in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic might be explained by the differences in the demobilisation and rightward turn of the working middle classes and by the differences in the polarisation of the economic elite. Gabor proposes a multidisciplinary methodological approach by a) developing a municipality level dataset to analyse how the vulnerability of the middle class lead to the collapse of the Left; b) creating a relational database to carry out a network analysis of the change in the connections among the members of the political and economic elite; and c) by providing qualitative case studies to underpin the causal narrative.

Susanne Schmidt

Research Associate and Lecturer,

Centre for Global History, Freie Unviersität Berlin

Susanne Schmidt is a research associate and lecturer (Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) in history, studying the history of modern social thought and practice. She joined the Department of History and Cultural Studies, Freie Universität, Berlin in spring 2018, having received her PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge earlier that year.

Susanne Schmidt’s research has been supported by the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (German Academic Scholarship Foundation), Arts and Humanities Research Council, Rockefeller Foundation, Kurt Hahn Trust, and others. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University; Visiting Predoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science; and predoctoral research fellow (Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at Humboldt University Berlin. Undergraduate and graduate studies in Berlin, Cambridge, Paris.

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Alexander Stingl

ISRF Independent Scholar Fellow 2018-19

Alexander I. Stingl gained a PhD in sociology in 2008, after studying social sciences, philosophy, (US-)American studies, and economics between 1997 and 2008 in Erlangen and Nürnberg, Germany. He is an empirical philosopher and sociologist of cognitive cultures and organizations, studying extended, embodied and enacted cognitive cultures and the modes of belonging, participation, and provisioning that they produce. This interest is applied to the following five empirical arenas: (1) bioeconomy and justice, (2) biodigitalization (interaction between non-conscious elements of life and digital objects), (3) biomedicalization and digitalization of childhood, (4) digital health care capital and social inequality, and (5) neurosociology and neurohumanities of gastronomic and sexual appetites. As of May 2018, he holds a 2018/19 Independent Scholar Fellowship (ISF4) with the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF), hosted by the Fondation Maison de sciences de l’homme (FMSH), Paris. Since 2017, he is chercheur associé with the Chaire du èconomie du bien-être at the Collège d’études mondiales, Paris. He has been an associate lecturer at the College of Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany, from 2011 to 2018. In 2017, supported by a fellowship from a joint Franco-German exchange fund by FMSH, German Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF) and the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), he collaborated on the International Panel on Social Progess.

Since 2014, he is a research consultant with the Institute for General and Family Medicine of the University Clinic Erlangen, Germany.

The aims of his ISRF project can be posed as two interrelated research questions: How is an “extractive logic” affecting justice in the bioeconomy discourse? How can the principle of generative justice become articulated in the biotechnological science, political and economic arenas that constitute the bioeconomy instead? In this project, the goal is to (a) evaluate the contemporary discourse on justice regarding its explicit and implicit logic of production, and its fundamental definitions of value and utility in biotechnology, economics, and political science; (b) to conduct an inquiry into the concepts of justice, value, and utility held by actual principals and agents of the bioeconomy, such as scientists, politicians, regulators, and business representatives;

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(c) formulate possible alternatives that account for political ecology and can possibly reconcile the Global Northern state of affairs with other genres of provisioning without leading to a precarization of life.

Sherrill Stroschein ISRF Mid-Career Fellow 2017-18 Dr. Sherrill Stroschein is a Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Department of Political Science at University College London, and Director of the Master’s Program on Democracy and Comparative Politics (since 2005). Previously she was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and an Assistant Professor at Ohio University.

Her research emphasises two main questions. First, why and how do individuals mobilise along lines of identity in politics – particularly ethnic identities? What do such mobilisations mean for coexistence? Second, what are the implications of mobilised ethnic identities within democratic institutions? The politics of ethnic enclaves, where demographics are reversed at the local level, is the focus of her current research project.

In addition to journal articles, she has published Ethnic Struggle, Coexistence, and Democratization in Eastern Europe (Cambridge 2012), and the edited volume Governance in Ethnically Mixed Cities (Routledge 2007). She is associate editor of the journal Problems of Post-Communism and is involved in planning for the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN). Much of her research has focused on Eastern Europe, and she has a working knowledge of several European languages.

Anke te Heesen

Professor of the History of Science, HU Berlin

Anke te Heesen has held the position of Professor of the History of Science at the HumboldtUniversität zu Berlin since 2011. Her research focuses on the development and organization of knowledge in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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Professor te Heesen studied cultural pedagogy at the Universität-Hildesheim (1985-1991) and received her Ph.D from the University Oldenburg in 1995. During this period she was a visiting scholar at the Department for the History of Science at the Georg-August Universität in Göttingen (1992-1994) as well as a Walter Rathenau Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (1994-1995). Subsequently she worked as a research fellow at the Research Center for European Enlightenment in Potsdam (1996-1997), as a curator for the German Hygiene Museum Dresden (1998-1999), and a research fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science (1999-2006). During this period, Professor te Heesen was a visiting scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, UK (2001), a research fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart (2003) as well as a research fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna (2005/2006). After acting as Founding Director of the Museum of the Universität Tübingen (MUT) (2006-2008), she held the position of Professor for Empirical Cultural Studies at the Universität Tübingen (2008-2011).

In 2010 she was a visiting scholar at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris. Professor te Heesen has furthermore lectured at various universities in Germany and abroad as well as organized exhibitions at numerous museums. She is a recipient of the Aby Warburg Prize, awarded by the Aby-Warburg-Stiftung, Hamburg (2008).

Martin Thomas ISRF Mid-Career Fellow 2015-16 Martin Thomas is Professor of Imperial History and Director of the Centre for the Study of War, State and Society at the University of Exeter. A specialist in the politics of contested decolonization, his most recent publications are Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and their Roads from Empire(Oxford University Press, 2014), and, with Richard Toye, Arguing about Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently Principal Investigator for a Leverhulme Trust research network, Understanding Insurgencies: Resonances from the Colonial Past.

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Christine von Oertzen

MPIWG Senior Research Scholar

Christine von Oertzen is a Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. Her monographs The Pleasure of a Surplus Income (2007) and Science, Gender, Internationalism (2014) explore gender politics in society and in academia. In her recent publications, she extends her interest in gender to the material culture of collecting, compiling and visualizing data, from manual and machine processing of nineteenth-century census data to at-home observation of infants. She is co-editor of the 2013 Centaurus special issue, entitled Beyond the Academy: Histories of Gender and Knowledge (with Maria Rentetzi and Elizabeth Watkins), the 2017 Osiris volume on Data Histories (with Elena Aronova and David Sepkoski), and Working With Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge (forthcoming 2019, with Carla Bittel and Elaine Leong).

Illan rua Wall

ISRF Early Career Fellow 2016-17

Illan rua Wall is an Associate Professor at the Warwick Law School. He holds a BCL from University College Cork, an LLM from the National University of Ireland, Galway and a PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London. He has published on critical legal theory, theories of constituent power, the Arab Spring, protest and transitional justice in Colombia, theories of human rights and revolt, and new Andean constitutional apparatuses. He is the co-founder of the blog criticallegalthinking.com.

His ISRF project works on the relation between law and disorder. Legal concepts are usually framed as being a part of the everyday social order. However, in moments of disorder we find the legal system stripped of its conventional architecture: the monopoly of the use of force, the control of territory and populations, the authority of the legislature, the constitutional unity of the people, or law’s claim to neutral universal protection. In moments of disorder, law as an institution and a basis of the social order is questioned. The problem with extant ideas of the law of disorder is that they start from law’s ‘normalcy’. The ‘Law of Disorder’ reverses the priority

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wherein law is the horizon of meaning for understanding disorder. Instead it places the emphasis on thinking from within the ‘disordered’ event, attempting to see beyond the conventional legal understanding of constitutional ‘origins’, criminal prosecution and balancing of rights.

Joy White ISRF Independent Scholar Fellow 2015-16 Dr Joy White was an ISRF Independent Scholar in 2015/2016. Joy is an Independent Researcher.

Joy is the author of Urban Music and Entrepreneurship: Beats, Rhymes and Young People’s Enterprise (Routledge: Advances in Sociology). It is one of the first books to foreground the socio-economic significance of the UK urban music economy, with particular reference to Grime music. In 2017, she was the Principal Investigator on the ISRF-funded Residential Research Group project Crossing borders: Marginality and opportunity in contemporary British urban youth culture.

Joy writes on a range of themes including: social mobility, urban marginality, youth violence, mental health/wellbeing and urban music. She has a lifelong interest in the performance geographies of black music. Website: joywhite.co.uk

Hansjakob Ziemer

MPIWG Head of Cooperation & Communication

& Research Scholar

Hansjakob Ziemer is Research Scholar and Head of Cooperation and Communication (since 2008) at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Hansjakob received his PhD in Modern History from the Humboldt University in 2007. In his thesis he dealt with the cultural history of concert life in the beginning of the twentieth century in Frankfurt am Main in order to show the concert hall as a site where society came to terms with the cultural and social consequences of Modernity. He is also working on the history of emotions, of concert hall architecture, and of musicology. His next project will address the history of journalistic knowledge in the nineteenth

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and twentieth centuries. At the moment, Hansjakob is involved in two editing projects: for OUP he coedits with Christian Thorau a handbook on the history of music listening in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (to be published in 2017), and with Daniel Morat he coedits a handbook Sound: Geschichte, Begriffe, Ansätze (Metzler, to be published in 2018).

THE CONVERSATION From April 2017, the ISRF began a partnership with The Conversation, an online platform that works with academics to turn current research into short news articles aimed at a general audience - see www.theconversation.com.

Josephine Lethbridge is The Conversation’s Interdisciplinary Editor, funded by the ISRF. Josephine’s role includes working with scholars at The Conversation’s member universities, as well as past and present Fellows of the ISRF, to bring interdisciplinary social research to millions of readers worldwide. Josephine will encourage researchers to write short newsworthy articles, working with them to produce pieces with journalistic flair but no loss of academic rigour. The ISRF hopes that, by promoting inter-disciplinarity through this partnership with The Conversation, the usefulness of interdisciplinary approaches will reach broader audiences, and that knowledge of such work will spread beyond the confines of academia.

Josephine Lethbridge Josephine Lethbridge became Interdisciplinary Editor at The Conversation after over three years as the UK’s initial Arts + Culture Editor. As well as articles on new research, she also commissioned academics to write commentary on popular culture news and to review films and art exhibitions.

Josephine has an MA in English Literature from the University in Glasgow, and since autumn 2015 has also been studying part-time towards an MSc in Science, Technology and Society at UCL, which she will complete in September 2017. She is mostly looking at the history of the idea of going to war on global warming and visions of geoengineering the climate. These diverse interests mean that she is thrilled to have become The Conversation’s first Interdisciplinary Editor.

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In her spare time, Josephine enjoys going to the cinema and exploring London’s industrial history.

She is also a trustee of the Queille Trust, which organises a biennial arts festival in the south of France and aims to support the careers of emerging performers. She lives in south east London.

Josephine is attending the whole of the ISRF Workshop and any Fellows wishing to know more about the commissioning process or simply have a chat about pitching an article should speak with her directly or contact her on josephine.lethbridge@theconversation.com

THE EXHIBITION SPACE The Exhibition Space will feature:

• Catherine Charrett’s film trailer for her performance, titled ‘Politics in Drag: Sipping Toffee with Hamas in Brussels’ How can politics be performed otherwise? “Politics in Drag: Sipping Toffee with Hamas in Brussels” is a 45-minute solo performance, which shows how Palestinian politics can be ordered differently. Based on extensive interviews with Hamas leaders and EU representatives, this performance piece re-fictionalises the EU’s response to Hamas’s success in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. All are invited to come and witness this hyperbolic, melancholic and parodic telling of conversations that never took place!

The performance piece, “Politics in Drag: Sipping Toffee with Hamas in Brussels” was first staged at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre in May 2014. The Performance was open to the public and to the university’s community.

The full 45-minute film can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/277237076/7970e5ca13

• Sebastian Felten’s film trailer for the documentary titled ‘Cerro Rico: the silver mountain’ Sebastian explains, “Last year I taught a class on hierarchies of knowledge in the early modern world (1500-1800). Mining was a fruitful site to explore: artisans, workers, white-collar

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administrators, and men of science worked together across stark social divides. Each group added their expertise to the mining enterprise, even if people at the time (like historians today) give the engineers more credit for mental labour as they made maps and reports. I was looking for a way to make my students sensitive to miners’ epistemology, which sprang from working in a dangerous and unhealthy environment that teemed with a vitality of its own. This short documentary, ‘Cerro Rico: The Silver Mountain’, (Austria, 2015) by Armin Thalhammer and his team was useful for this. The movie offers an impressive insight into the hard and dangerous daily routine of workers in Potosí, a mining complex in modern-day Bolivia that has been active for over 400 years. Technology and social relations may have changed yet the darkness and suffocating air resonate with early modern descriptions of the experience underground. Dust, noise, and flickering headlights create a disorienting scenery, deep down in one of the most iconic and infamous mines of the world.”

• Jill Gibbon’s display ‘The Etiquette of the Arms Trade’ The UK and US regularly sell weapons to repressive regimes and countries involved in aggressive wars. Jill Gibbon uses drawing and performance to research the etiquette that normalises these deals. She visits arms fairs in Europe and the Middle East by dressing up as an arms trader, the masquerade a metaphor for a performance of respectability in the industry. Once inside, she draws, and collects complementary gifts from the stalls.

This display includes a selection of sketchbooks, notebooks, and gifts from DSEI, Eurosatory, and IDEX arms fairs 2013 – 2018.

• Erin Kavanagh’s ‘So Far, So Good’ poem As Erin explains: In August 2017, many of us received an email from Fraser Joyce which stated that “This year the foundation would like to capture some of the discussions arising out of the workshop ‘Today’s Futures’ in the form of constructed conversations built from contributions submitted by the ISRF delegates.”

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The email also requested that our contributions were “short” - and the result was an article that reflected the workshop whilst mimicking the style of a roundtable discussion.

I then applied a Cut Out method of poetry to that completed montage, which shortened each contribution further, into what I (rightly or wrongly) understood from the constituent parts (1.0). A different colour was assigned to each author to clarify who had written what, as well as to depict visual balance. The left me with a version of the original prose, in the form of a poem (2.0). However, this was still too long for the publication space… therefore I then had to Cut Out from the original Cut Out, creating an abstract (3.0). This is the version that went into print.

The display here, makes partially transparent this process of reducing 14 different voices from 6573 words into only 842. It is only partial because the thinking that was required to negotiate multiple styles, perspectives and topics remains elusively opaque. Some edits flew from the page with ease, others fought and tangled, turning in on themselves. All were at the mercy of their own punctuation. I hope that they have been fairly represented. Whether my own voice is present in the twisting of angles, the spaces in between lines, where the shadowed silences almost sit - is for the reader to decide. Thank you all for playing along.

• Emanuele Lobina’s contribution to a film documentary titled, ‘Up to the Last Drop: the secret water war in Europe’, by filmmaker Yorgos Avgeropoulos As Lobina explains: In 2010, water was officially recognised as a universal human right by the United Nations. However, the European Union has yet to do the same. The management of water has long been in the hands of private companies, but resistance to this profit-driven model has increased in Europe since 2000. Activists against water privatisation in Greece, Portugal and Ireland say that the EU applies pressure to privatise water services using the economic crisis as a pretext for the creation of a water market in Europe. In many cases, the decision to close the book on water privatisation is the response to the failure of private

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operators to put the needs of communities before profit.

There have been 235 recorded cases of water remunicipalisation in 37 countries from 2000 to 2015, affecting over 100 million people. “Ninety-four cases of these come from France. And I think that this is quite important as a trend, especially since France is the country that has invented water privatisation as we know it today. The country that knows water privatisation best.”

• Susanne Schmidt’s display on ‘Midlife Crisis: The Origins of a Misunderstood Idea’, including a series of images and a radio feature (in German) As Susanne asks: Does the midlife crisis really exist, this inescapable urge to change one’s life midway through? Women, men and scientists have been arguing about this for decades.

Hardly anyone asks, however, where the idea actually comes from!

Most tales and treatises about midlife crisis center on men. But the history of the midlife crisis begins with the women’s movement in the 1970s. The New York journalist Gail Sheehy made the midlife crisis popular as a concept that applied to men and women and described the end of traditional middle-aged gender roles. Her book Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1976) became a nation-wide, indeed, international bestseller, selling millions of copies for many years. Yet Sheehy’s original idea of mid-life crisis is almost forgotten today. This radio feature tells the story of the unexpected origins and conflicted history of the mid-life crisis.

• Joy White’s trailer for her documentary film, ‘Making it Funky’ Making it Funky is a documentary based on a case study from Ayia Napa. It shows how a market has been created for urban music in Europe. Through participant observation and interviews, it also explores, and provides evidence of, the mutual dependence of the formal and informal economy in this sector.

Far from being a highly localised, niche creative practice, the act of creating Grime music

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propels its practitioners out into the world and away from ‘the ends’ or local neighbourhoods.

Between 2007 and 2009, I carried out 11 semi structured interviews in east London. During the interviews and while exploring the artistic output of the Grime scene online and on radio, it became apparent that although the respondents were grounded in east London through residence and/or performance, their reach and influence extended far beyond this locale.

From the interviews, Ayia Napa, a resort in southern Cyprus, emerged as a popular site for artists in the Grime scene.

From its inception, Grime, a cultural form that navigates and articulates the lived experience of the inner city, had an established footprint in the UK. By the summer of 2009, UK Funky had emerged as a new genre and many luminaries of the Grime scene became actively involved. For young people planning holidays, a variety of factors come into play but the desire to pursue musical tastes abroad is a key motivation. Social media, radio stations - both pirate and licensed, also promote the hype that accompanies and encourages participation in the international party arena.

This film was shot over three days in August 2009. I wanted to capture each segment of the holiday experience, the airport, the beach, the club, and the after party, talking to people at every stage. I interviewed 16 people in Ayia Napa; DJs, MCs, event promoters, holidaymakers, and a barber.

More detail on this case study can be found in Chapter 5 of my book: Urban Music and Entrepreneurship: Beats, Rhymes and Young People’s Enterprise

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THE 2019 ISRF ESSAY COMPETITION Interdisciplinarity: The New Orthodoxy?

The Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) intends to award research funding of €5,000 for the best essay on the topic ‘Interdisciplinarity: the new orthodoxy?’ This is a topic, not a title. Accordingly, authors are free to choose an essay title within this field.

Essays may address any topic, problem or critical issue around or on this theme. The successful essay will be intellectually radical and articulate a strong internal critique of existing views. Writers should bear in mind that the ISRF is interested in original research ideas that take new approaches and suggest new solutions to real world social problems. The winning author will be awarded a prize of €5,000 in the form of a grant for research purposes.

The submitted essays will be judged by an academic panel (the ISRF Essay Prize Committee). The panel’s decision will be final, and no assessments or comments will be made available. The ISRF reserves the right not to award the prize, and no award will be made if the submitted essays are of insufficient merit.

The winning essay, and any close runners-up, will be accepted for short format presentation at the 2019 ISRF Annual Workshop (expenses for attendance at which will be covered by the ISRF) and publication in the ISRF Bulletin; authors may be asked to make some corrections before publication.

The winner will be able to visit The Conversation UK for a day, see how the news site operates behind the scenes and spend some one-on-one time with Josephine Lethbridge, the ISRFfunded Interdisciplinary Editor, discussing their research, its potential news angles and how best to draft a pitch, with the potential of writing an article should an idea be agreed upon.

Application Deadline: 31st December 2018 More Information: http://www.isrf.org/2019EssayPrize

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ISRF FLEXIBLE GRANTS FOR SMALL GROUPS COMPETITION The Independent Social Research Foundation wishes to support independent-minded researchers to explore and present original research ideas which take new approaches, and suggest new solutions, to real world social problems. Such work would be unlikely to be funded by existing funding bodies.

There are two categories of award, (I) Flexible, and (II) Residential. The ISRF intends to make several awards in each category, on a competitive basis, to candidates of sufficient merit.

Both categories of award are intended as providing support for intensive small group research collaboration.

Category I: The Flexible award is intended to facilitate collaborative face-to-face working over a period of up to one year, by providing the PI(s) with funds for expenses for meetings and small workshops, for travel, and for associated fieldwork and practical work. Such projects must begin no later than the end of December 2019.

For Category I (Flexible) awards, the ISRF expects applications up to a maximum of £5,000 or €5,500.† Category II: The Residential award is intended to support a week’s intensive face-to-face group work in an onsite residential meeting. The designated date for this is 4-9 August 2019, and the venue in Berlin is provided at no cost; PIs will be able to use their monetary award for participants’ travel, and for any extra expenses associated with the residential research programme. The awarded research groups will each have provided for them a dedicated onsite research space, accommodation in ensuite study bedrooms, and full board. There will also be social space shared by all research groups, and the ISRF will host an informal social event. The ISRF-funded Interdisciplinary Editor at The Conversation will also be available for groups or individual group members to discuss ways in which research findings may be disseminated to a wider audience.

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For Category II (Residential) awards, requested funds should not exceed £4,250 or €4,700.† †Applicants based in the UK must apply in GBP (£). All other applicants must apply in EUR (€).

These amounts are fixed as of 5th September 2018, and will not be adjusted in the event of GBP/ EUR currency fluctuations.

Scholars from within Europe are eligible to apply as Principal Investigator(s) to lead a small group of 2-8 scholars (which may include graduate students). Principal applicants should hold a PhD and will normally have a permanent appointment at an institution of higher education and research. Applications may be made by those whose sole or principal post is a part-time equivalent. Independent scholars with an academic affiliation may also apply.

Applicants should consult the Criteria as set out in the Further Particulars (see link below) and show that they meet them. Applicants should follow the Application procedure and should present their Proposal in the format specified there.

For more information & to apply, visit http://www.isrf.org/fg5/ Closing date for applications is 4pm (GMT) on 2nd November 2018.

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Organising Committee:

Louise Braddock Rachael Kiddey Ohad Parnes Hansjakob Ziemer