The essays of this special issue result from discussions at and around the workshop Academic Authority and the Politics of Science and History in Eastern Europe that was planned for March 2020 at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) yet rearranged into a series of online colloquia due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The workshop was part of the research initiative (East) European Epistemologies.
This essay studies the narrative self‐positioning of Science Studies in the German Democratic Republic during the 1980s. Drawing on archival material on the foundation of the Council for Marxist‐Leninist Science Studies at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin in March 1988, it analyses how boundaries between Science Studies as a lone standing discipline and several other fields were construed and crossed at the same time and how (scientific) authority was claimed from the intermediate position of an external insider. Not only did Science Studies engage with their subject – the sciences –, but also with the politics of the Socialist Party, with the institution of the Academy, and with (industrial) production. After a formative institutional phase that spanned across the 1970s, Science Studies made efforts to centralize their work during the 1980s, to bind themselves closer to the state and scientific institutions, and to distinguish themselves from them at the same time.
Artykuł inspiruje się projektem Mieke Bal o wędrujących pojęciach, którego geneza tkwi w refleksji nad międzydyscyplinarnymi nieporozumieniami w dyskusjach i nauczaniu akademickim. Podejście Bal jest tu porównane z przedsięwzięciem polskiego naukowca, Antoniego B. Dobrowolskiego, który planując założenie archiwum materiałów do badania twórczości (1927), chciał poprawić jakość nauczania w polskich szkołach. Podczas gdy celem Bal było rozjaśnienie intersubiektywnego potencjału pojęć, to Dobrowolski zachęcał naukowców do spisywania biografii własnego procesu twórczego. Niepowodzenie projektu Dobrowolskiego zostaje tu dodatkowo przeanalizowane w ujęciu historycznym poprzez zestawienie z niemieckim opracowaniem tekstów biograficznych wielkich uczonych pod redakcją m.in. Raymunda Schmidta.
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