Event

Faculty and graduate student open-ended discussion group exploring major themes, topics, and puzzles in the history of science, technology, medicine, and the environment. Each month focuses on a different theme, with topics ranging from agency, biography, and the definition of science. This month hosted by Melissa Charenko, Assistant Professor, History and Sociology of Science.

Please bring your own lunch and enjoy coffee and pastries from the History and Sociology of Science Department.

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Near the beginning of his recent book, Dylan Mulvin asks “To whom or to what do we delegate power to represent the world?” In science, technology, and medicine, we’ve delegated representational power to many different objects. Crash test dummies act as substitutes for human bodies, simulating how people might respond to collisions. Tree rings, ice cores, fossil pollen, and other proxies stand in for instrumental measurements of former climates. Model organisms fill in for human subjects in the early phases of drug trials. Medical actors (so-called standardized patients) are trained to embody the typical symptoms of diseases to train physicians. Computer models represent future worlds. Apollo 11 astronauts trained at sites on Earth similar to the moon. The list could go on (and I invite you to add other examples). What I’m really interested in by creating this genealogy of objects given representational power in science, technology, and medicine are questions such as:

What kind of work do these representations help scientists do?

What work needs to be completed for something to stand in?

Are there instances when something is not able to stand in? Or does so only partially?

Do different epistemic communities have different stand-ins? Do they travel?

Are there key differences between that which stands in (such as between models, analogies, proxies)?

The last question is of particular interest because historians have thought deeply about some of these stand-ins (such as models and metaphors), but not others. Is there more to be learned about scientific practices when we broaden questions about what it means for something to stand in?

 For this semester’s final meeting of the Theories of History Discussion Group, we’ll be talking about what it means when something stands in, how some objects become stand-ins, and how we work with stand-ins as historians.