Independent Social Research Foundation workshop

Relating Pasts and Presents: History of Science and Social Science

26-28 September 2018
Harnack-Haus, Berlin

The 2018 ISRF Workshop pursues the line of thought emerging from last year’s ‘Today’s Futures’, that 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? Particularly, when the ISRF’s fellows meet historians of knowledge at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

The ISRF’s commitment is 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. In the 2018 Workshop we plan a wide-ranging exploration of how a sensibility to the history of knowledge might inspire thinking in social science. With a format of short research presentations, thematic discussions, dialogues across disciplines, and participants’ creative responses, the ISRF will engage with scholars at the Max Planck Institute over what history of science and social science might make of one another.