EDITORIAL Dr. Lars Cornelissen ISRF Academic Editor
W
e are accustomed to thinking of time as a unidirectional phenomenon, where past, present and future are ordered in a linear way and where the boundary between the then and the now is reliably impermeable. Mapped onto our self-conception as social scientists, this view of time can easily be translated into equally impermeable disciplinary frontiers: the historian concerns herself with the past, whilst the political scientist or the sociologist is dedicated to studying the present. There are situations, however, where this neat and intuitive notion of temporality begins to falter. In particular, there exist spaces where the pull of the past is so strong that its distinction from the present comes to fade away. One could think of memorial sites, archives, monuments, graveyards and archaeological digs—all of which are sites that, either by design or by accident, function as a means for the past to bleed into the present. Here, the division that separates the now from the then ceases to be a boundary and becomes a threshold, inviting us to remember, study or simply acknowledge the events and people that made us who we are today. As our customary understanding of time is thus unsettled, crucial questions present themselves. How are we to make sense of the complex relationship between spatiality and temporality? What are the origins of our everyday understanding of the passage of time? And, more narrowly, to what extent do disciplinary boundaries stand in the way of finding satisfactory answers to these questions? The topic for the ISRF’s 2018 Annual Workshop was ‘Relating Pasts and Presents’. Co-organised with and hosted by the Max-PlanckInstitut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, this Workshop sought to bring social scientists and historians of science together in order to reflect precisely on the complex relationship between the past and the present. Key to this discussion was the necessity for, and the meaning 4
