Des sciences et des savoirs en mouvement : réflexions historiographiques et enjeux méthodologiques

• Main Author: Antonella Romano
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires du Midi 2014-12-01
• Series: Diasporas: Circulations, Migrations, Histoire
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/diasporas/302

Investigating mobility or circulation within the framework of the history of science is somehow new, and is deeply rooted in the in-depth changes that took place in this field. The issue of agency, the questions related to actors, their practices and the systems of communications they shape and negotiate in order to produce science, in other words, the analysis of knowledge as a process, are the preliminary conditions for questioning movements, spaces and places as part of the construction of knowledge itself. Before the rise of this new historiographical trend, sciences were mostly studied as universal, as expressed by the development of modern science. The paper explores the multiple paths which led to the current collective research agenda: what is at stake thus is an invitation, beyond history of science and knowledge, to rethink the relation both between Europe and the world in the early modern period, and between the different social sciences today.