From the dissecting rooms of antebellum Virginia to the mathematical institutes of Weimar Germany, from the missionary hospitals of colonial Kashmir to the feminist print networks of 1970s Britain, this conference asks how knowledge is made, who it serves, and whose bodies, voices, and labours it renders invisible. Across five (do we have five lol) panels, presenters examine the sciences, technologies, and medical practices that have shaped, and been shaped by power. For example, the anatomical theatre as a site of racial and class exploitation; the atomic bomb as a collective moral crisis obscured by the myth of individual genius; the archive as a place where disability, queerness, and enslaved labour are simultaneously documented and erased. Spanning four centuries and five continents, the papers gathered here refuse to treat science, medicine, and technology as neutral or universal. Instead, they recover the negotiations, resistances, and exclusions through which knowledge has always been produced, from the mānuka tree asserting its own agency in colonial New Zealand, to the nurses whose care sustained the 1918 influenza response yet vanished from the historical record, to the images that did not merely illustrate scientific racism but constituted it. This is a conference about authority: who holds it, how it is legitimized, and what is lost when we mistake the stories power tells about itself for history.
Programme will be forthcoming shortly.
