Organisation: Friedrich Cain, Wien
The panel adopts a history-of-knowledge perspective that foregrounds the organization, mediation, and institutional embedding of knowledge between scientific, medical, technological, and artistic contexts. Four case studies from the second half of the 20th century analyze the analytical and ideological perspectives of state initiatives to fund and promote scientific and artistic research on the one hand, and the technical, infrastructural as well as individual settings of creative practices on the other. Looking at scientific training scenarios, cultural diplomacy, large scientific infrastructures, and the institutionalization of feminist grass root campaigning in Cold War and transition Czechoslovakia, Greece as well as Eastern and Western Germany, the four papers study bodies of knowledge that were regarded as cultural, social or scientific and how they had to be re-arranged, mediated and authorized in specific ways so that they could be used to influence respective decision makers and policies eventually.
Rather than approaching translation as a neutral or technical process, the panel questions it as a site of power, where epistemic hierarchies are not only constantly negotiated, but also only become legible, credible, and actionable as forms of knowledge, while others are marginalized or excluded. We are interested in technologies, media, and the social and political contexts of gender, ethnicity, geopolitics through which these translations were produced and circulated etc. A central question is to what extent and in what ways notions of translation can help us analyze how knowledge is integrated into institutional and policy regimes, and how these processes shape the formation of knowledge societies.