Forger la science et la médecine

Forging Science and Medicine: Categories, Objects, Boundaries 

Call for papers

Workshop, Universidad del Rosario (Bogotá, Colombia), August 28-29, 2014.

This workshop aims to discuss historical cases dealing with the co-construction of science (natural and social) and medicine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With the aim of circumventing historical narratives that assume an a priori distinction between science and medicine, this workshop seeks contributions which problematize the alleged boundaries between them. We are particularly interested in research that shows how historical actors’ categories and behaviours with regard to what they do and define as pertaining to “science”

and/or “medicine”, contributed to the creation of new objects of enquiry, technologies and specialties, or to the obsolescence of analogous entities, previously standard. Moreover, the workshop will explore how discussions and practices about the boundaries between science and medicine, as defined by historical actors, have been shaped through translational activities such as training, communication and policy making. A sample of major questions addressed by this workshop is:

• How have the holders of expert knowledge established boundaries between science and medicine?

• How have the attributes of being “scientific” or pertaining to the “medical” realm been used to make original knowledge claims?

• What are the spaces in which medicine and science are made to appear as different or the same?

• What has been the discursive and practical role of conflict and cooperation between science and medicine as defined by actors themselves?

• How have new objects of enquiry and technologies been built at the crossroad of what contemporaries experienced as scientific and medical endeavours?

• How have ideas of science and medicine and their boundaries been shaped by training, communication and policy making?


The working languages of this workshop are English and Spanish.

A limited number of accommodation grants are available. Interested applicants should submit a) an abstract (maximum 600 words) that describes the content of the paper, the question it addresses, and the historiographical contribution to the understanding of the historical construction of the relations between science and medicine; b) a one page CV resumé, including main publications.


Applications should be submitted to Monica Garcia claudia.garcia@urosario.edu.co by March 10. Applicants will be notified of the results of the application one week after the submission deadline.


Papers will be pre-circulated. The workshop organizers are committed to see the papers published as an international journal special issue.



Organized by Mónica García, Stefan Pohl and Josep Simon (GESCTP, Universidad del Rosario, www.gesctp.com)


This workshop is a continuation of the symposium Science X Medicine: Promiscuous Objects, Entangled Problems held at the 24th International Congress of History of Science, Technology and Medicine (Manchester, 2013).

- See more at: http://conectahistoria.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/cfp-forging-science-and-medicine.html#sthash.MriNfL4j.82wh3CDt.dpuf