The Spaces of Knowledge: Contributions towards a Historical Geography of Science

In recent times there has been a remarkable spatial turn within a variety of academic discourses. Historians, social theorists, anthropologists, and philosophers have all redrawn attention to the constitutive significance of place and space, site and situation, locality and territoriality. After briefly sketching some of the major features of this ‘geographical recovery’, I examine some of its implications for the study of the scientific enterprise. Such issues as the regionalisation of scientific style, the political topography of scientific commitment, and the social and material spaces of laboratories and scientific societies are considered, These materials provide both a framework and a suite of case studies for the elaboration of a historical geography of science. Last, I briefly draw attention to some implications that a spatialised historiography has for understanding the history of the geographical tradition itself.

[1]  Chris Philo,et al.  Foucault's Geography , 1992 .

[2]  D. Gregory.  Interventions in the Historical Geography of Modernity: Social Theory, Spatiality and the Politics of Representation , 1991 .

[3]  R. Dickinson.  Regional concept: The Anglo-American leaders , 1976 .

[4]  W. L. Ballard,et al.  The imperial archive : knowledge and the fantasy of empire , 1995, The Journal of Asian Studies.

[5]  John Urry,et al.  Social Relations, Space and Time , 1985 .

[6]  Martin Rudwick,et al.  Gentlemen of Science. Early years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science , 1982, Medical History.

[7]  E. Soja.  The Spatiality of Social Life: Towards a Transformative Retheorisation , 1985 .

[8]  G. Fyfe,et al.  Picturing Power: Visual Depiction and Social Relations , 1988 .

[9]  David Harvey,et al.  The Geopolitics of Capitalism , 2020, The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles.

[10]  Harold Maurice Collins,et al.  Public Experiments and Displays of Virtuosity: The Core-Set Revisited , 1988 .

[11]  John Law,et al.  On the Methods of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation and the Portuguese Route to India , 1984 .

[12]  Alisdair MacIntyre.  Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science , 1977 .

[13]  D. Stoddart.  On geography and its history , 1986 .

[14]  R. George.  Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition , 1991 .

[15]  R. Stafford.  Roderick Murchison and the structure of Africa: A geological prediction and its consequences for British expansion , 1988 .

[16]  Alan Penn,et al.  Visible Colleges: Structure and Randomness in the Place of Discovery , 1991, Science in Context.

[17]  D. Jary,et al.  Giddens' Theory of Structuration: A Critical Appreciation , 1990 .

[18]  P. Carter.  The Road to Botany Bay: An essay in spatial history , 1988 .

[19]  Henri Lefebvre,et al.  REFLECTIONS ON THE POLITICS OF SPACE , 1976 .

[20]  J. Tallis,et al.  Saving the Prairies. The Life Cycle of the Founding School of American Plant Ecology, 1895-1955. , 1984 .

[21]  P. Bourdieu.  SOCIAL SPACE AND SYMBOLIC POWER , 1989 .

[22]  D. Livingstone.  Science and religion: foreword to the historical geography of an encounter , 1994 .

[23]  D. Matless.  An Occasion for Geography: Landscape, Representation, and Foucault's Corpus , 1992 .

[24]  D Armstrong,et al.  Space and time in British general practice. , 1985, Social science & medicine.

[25]  S. Shapin.  The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England , 1988, Isis.

[26]  J. MacLaughlin.  Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory , 1994 .

[27]  Cole Harris.  Power, Modernity, and Historical Geography , 1991 .

[28]  Richard Hartshorne,et al.  The Nature Of Geography A Critical Survey Of Current Thought In The Light Of The Past , 2011 .

[29]  N. Thrift.  Environment and Planning D: Society and Space , 1995 .

[30]  D. Livingstone.  The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise , 1992 .

[31]  A. Buttimer,et al.  Society and milieu in the French geographic tradition , 1973 .

[32]  S. Gillmor.  The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge Among Gentlemanly Specialists , 1987 .

[33]  George Basalla,et al.  The Spread of Western Science , 1967, Science.

[34]  Michael Lynch,et al.  Laboratory Space and the Technological Complex: An Investigation of Topical Contextures , 1991, Science in Context.

[35]  S. Woolgar,et al.  Representation in Scientific Practice , 1990 .

[36]  David Gooding,et al.  ‘In Nature’s School’: Faraday as an Experimentalist , 1985 .

[37]  Charles Taylor.  Foucault on Freedom and Truth , 1984 .

[38]  J. Revel.  Knowledge of the Territory , 1991, Science in Context.

[39]  Donna Harawy.  Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective , 2022, Philosophical Literary Journal Logos.

[40]  N. Thrift,et al.  On the Determination of Social Action in Space and Time , 1983 .

[41]  A. Thackray.  Natural Knowledge in Cultural Context: The Manchester Mode , 1974 .

[42]  R. Macleod.  On Visiting the 'Moving Metropolis': Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science. , 1980 .

[43]  Steven Shapin,et al.  The Place of Knowledge A Methodological Survey , 1991, Science in Context.

[44]  Joseph T Rouse,et al.  Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science , 1987 .

[45]  D. Matless.  A Modern Stream: Water, Landscape, Modernism, and Geography , 1992 .

[46]  J. B. Harvey.  The Fall of Public Man , 1977 .

[47]  Edward S. Casey,et al.  Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World , 1993 .

[48]  Nigel Thrift,et al.  Flies and Germs: A Geography of Knowledge , 1985 .

[49]  G. Nelson.  The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London , 1990 .

[50]  J. Morrell,et al.  Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 1780-1850 , 1983 .

[51]  M. Pratt.  Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation , 1992 .

[52]  M. Foucault,et al.  Of Other Spaces , 1986 .

[53]  National styles, divergent classifications: A comparative case study from the history of French and American plant ecology , 1989 .

[54]  Jane Cauvel.  After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory , 1982 .

[55]  S. Shapin.  The Pottery Philosophical Society, 1819-1835: an Examination of the Cultural Uses of Provincial Science , 1972 .

[56]  Richard C. Jennings,et al.  Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life , 1988, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

[57]  G. Nelson.  The Comparative Reception of Darwinism , 1976 .