Research project Temporalities of Science: Constructing Past, Present, and Future of Knowledge 1945-1980
This project explores ideas of history, progress or future limits to growth that emerged as knowledge policies developed at the intersection of science, state and bureaucracy in Western countries in the post-war period.
Between 1940 and 1980, a politics of knowledge was established as the connection between science, the state, and bureaucracy grew in Western countries. This project examines three innovations within this process: scientometry, science documentation, and research policy. The aim is to explore ideas about history, progress, or future growth that these innovations helped shape. Additionally, the project seeks to understand how different perceptions of time influenced the infrastructure of scientific knowledge to measure and organize research. Focusing on Sweden and the USA, it aims to reveal trends across the Western world. Ultimately, the project historicizes contemporary notions of time, exploring how ideas about history and the future are undergoing profound changes. It contributes to an expanding field of research on historical and cultural temporality and offers insights into how perceptions of time shaped scientific knowledge and policy throughout the 20th century.
Project description
During the postwar period, Western welfare states started to invest in scientific research. Politicians, bureaucrats and scientists created arenas to fund and organize knowledge with high hopes of future progress. The increasing government responsibility shaped a dominating research policy regime. Integral to this regime were three institutional innovations: scientometrics (a field aimed at measuring scientific knowledge), science documentation and science policies. From the 1960s however, there emerged a growing critique of technological progress, e.g. through the modern environmental movement. These processes created contradictory ideas about the past, present and future of science and society.
The aim of this project is to study what I label “temporalities of science” in scientometrics, science documentation and science policies. I propose to study time, not as an abstract category, but as temporalities, i.e. ways of interpreting and illustrating time and notions of the history, present and future of science. Empirically, the project focuses on Sweden and the US, since both countries are examples of Western democracies trying to build robust societies founded on scientific knowledge.
The main research question is first how perceptions of the scientific process emerged in and through the creation of scientometrics, science documentation and science policies. Which images emerged of epochs in the past, the direction of historical developments and the changes in science and society? How could knowledge be accumulated over time, remembered and passed on to the future?
Second, the project asks how temporalities of science were related to perceived timescales of postwar society. A crucial hypothesis is that there were multiple temporalities, not easily combined. On the one hand, “progress” was a dominant idea in postwar democratic states. On the other hand, new concerns about global problems like the environment emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. The project investigates how these tensions played out as multiple temporalities at the very intersection of science and society. How were temporalities of science related to ideas about advancements and modernizations as well as about future limits and threats?
Furthermore, the project explores how temporalities of science were built into bureaucratic institutions for science policy, including ways of assuming responsibility and steer scientific knowledge. It has been noted how, in the 20th century, cultural spheres like “science” were shaped into autonomous infrastructures and fields of action, thus initiating a dynamic and inertia of Western societies. This infrastructure marked the build-up of a knowledge system where science was given a policy highly dependent upon temporalities.
Between the 18th and the 20th centuries, progress emerged as a dominant temporal idea in Western culture. The future was malleable and human history moving forward. In the 21st century, interconnected crises of climate and democracy impose themselves on entrenched thinking about progress. Scholars in the humanities have noted how societal timescales have emerged as a new concern. The deep time of the earth is now in new relations to ideas of acceleration in culture and the short timeframes of democratic elections and governance of society. The purpose of the project is to historicize the present situation. It unearths how temporalities formed the building of scientific knowledge in 20th century societies. It displays how temporal worldviews were built into research policy regimes, which now must be critically reevaluated as societal institutions struggle to be in sync with contemporary transformations.
In terms of a linear, singular timeline. Temporalities of the present disconnects us from temporal anchor points like “then” and “now”, which have become dominant over historical time. Studies a period in which a dominant monotemporal historicism became increasingly widespread, only to meet its endpoint in the present.
Project members
Project managers
Staffan Bergwik
Professor
