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It is well known that technological change causes social change, and vice versa. Using system and historical perspectives, this article examines that truth at a finer level of specificity, namely, that social perceptions of interconnectedness influence the progress of science and technology, and that conversely, as 21st-century technology makes us in fact more connected, society's anxieties shift. From the science/technology side, we look at interdisciplinary research, system and complexity theory, quantum tech, and the Internet, exploring how these interact and cause changes in social attitudes-fears, conspiracy theories, political polarization, and even entertainment trends-some of which are surprising, and some dangerous. The article's systems view helps make sense of current environmental, political, and psychological crises. It combines original ideas with those of several prominent thinkers, to suggest constructive actions.

This article aims to reflect on the place of history in the history of science from the perspective of Brazilian historiography of science, mainly according to the thought of the Brazilian physicist and historian of science, Carlos Alvarez Maia. Since the 1990s, Maia (2013) began to question why the history of science became (and still largely remains) a "history of absent historians" in the face of the predominance of history of science in the Natural Science Departments and the absence in History Departments. The dynamic and changing historiography of science itself reaffirms the lack of historical analyses using history's methodological and conceptual apparatus. Thus, epistemological aspects appear interrelated to political-institutional issues. Consequently, one has a political-epistemological perspective for discussing the place – or non-place – of history in the history of science. The thought of Maia (2013) acts as an essential starting point for reflection. It constitutes a possible opening in constructing a consolidation of discussions about the impacts (of the absence and the presence of the conceptual apparatus of history) in developing new historiography of science conceptually historical.

My roundtable contribution inevitably starts with a critique of the field the scholarly utility of which we as contributors wish to defend. The study of the antique sciences (including the history of archaeology and heritage) still has marginal standing in science studies. So does the Middle East as a geographical region, which until recently enjoyed little scholarly interest in the field. The persistent Eurocentric research agenda of science studies has been questioned, however, with the recent call for a "global history of science." This ambiguous term has triggered new methodological challenges, but it has also created new trenches.

While most scientists and philosophers of science privilege scientific knowledge, and have sought demarcations of science from non-science to justify the privilege, sociologists of science, small numbers of philosophers of science, anthropologists, and some scientists themselves have been attracted to a new way of talking about science. Prefigured by Ludwik Fleck (1935/1979) and Gaston Bachelard (1934/1984), nurtured by the controversies over Thomas Kuhn's work, and instantiated in the Edinburgh School's Strong Program, the naturalistic turn portrays science as a human activity, part of the woof and warp of culture itself. Yet curiously historians of science have been less involved in this recent reconceptualization of both science and scientific knowledge.

This paper aims to revisit the intellectual tension in the River Plate region surrounding a dispute between the Hungarian philosopher Desiderio Papp and the Argentine-Uruguayan physicist Félix Cernuschi when they were contenders for the Chair of Scientific Thought at the School of Humanities and Sciences of the Universidad de la República in Uruguay. Their disagreement was personal, political, and philosophical and divided the waters among the emerging community of physicists in the region and a group of actors who, for some time, had been devoted to the History of Science in the universities of the region. The History of Science constituted the battleground out of which it would emerge how science should be understood in a Uruguayan university that, historically speaking, had been remiss in providing an appropriate space for its development. In revisiting this event, this paper seeks to throw light on the present situation of an almost non-existent History of Science in Uruguay.

AbstractPierre Bourdieu is one of the most celebrated and widely known French sociologists of his time. During his long and very productive career, Bourdieu worked not only on very diverse areas of sociology, such as art, religion, the legal system, and education, but also on the culture of the Kabyle, on the marriage strategies of bachelors in Southern France, and on the sociology of the French intellectuals of his era. However, despite his international influence, his work has remained virtually unutilized within most contemporary historiography of science. This article aims to fill this lacuna. After a short presentation of his main theoretical concepts, I discuss Bourdieu's work on scientific practice. I then present his more historically oriented work and finish by suggesting some ways Bourdieu's insights can be useful for history of science.

This spotlight issue encourages reflection on the current COVID-19 pandemic not simply through comparisons with previous epidemics, but also by illustrating that epidemics deserve study within their broader cultural, political, scientific, and geographic contexts. Epidemics are not solely a function of pathogens; they are also a function of how society is structured, how political power is wielded in the name of public health, how quantitative data is collected, how diseases are categorised and modelled, and how histories of disease are narrated. Each of these activities has its own history. As historians of science and medicine have long pointed out, even the most basic methodologies that underpin scientific research – observation, trust in numbers, the use of models, even the experimental method itself – have a history. They should not be taken as a given, but understood as processes, or even strategies, that were negotiated, argued for and against, and developed within particular historical contexts and explanatory schemes. Knowing the history of something – whether of numbers, narratives, or disease – enables us to see a broader range of trajectories available to us. These varied histories also remind us that we are currently in the midst of a chaotic drama of uncertainty, within our own unstable and unfolding narrative.

Introduction: writing the transnational history of science and technology / John Krige -- The US regulatory state

Recent scholarship on the history of science in the People's Republic of China (PRC) has provided new horizons for exploring questions about the nature and epistemology of socialist science, its epistemic virtues, its knowledge-producing practices, its geographical imagination and networks of communication and exchange, and its relations to the Chinese state and state building. In this essay the author uses a focus on practice to extrapolate implications and tendencies that he sees as unifying recent studies, and he clarifies their contributions to the current understanding of the history of science in the PRC. Particularly with respect to Chinese state-science relations and the nature of Maoist mass science, a focus on practice illuminates how recent scholarship has queried and interrogated unitary conceptions of the Chinese state and science, highlighted transnational connections and movements, and deepened our understanding of Maoist mass science.