Call for Papers
Special issue (16, 2025) | Science and power: authoritarianism and disciplinary paradigms (19th and 20th centuries)
Coords.: Tomás Aguilera Durán (UAM) (tomas.aguilera@uam.es) & Alejandra Palafox Menegazzi (UGR) (alexgnd@ugr.es)
Deadline for submissions: 30 / 06/ 2025
Science and power: authoritarianism and disciplinary paradigms (19th and 20th centuries)
This special issue will consider the different ways in which science and scientific culture operated as mechanisms of power in complex political contexts throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will address the strategies of control and regulation – conceived, reformulated or implemented in contemporary times – that had science as the argumentative axis or that made use of it, assessing their scope and effectiveness within the disciplinary paradigms of the time. It will also address any manifestations of resistance or challenging of their authoritarian enforcement.
The special issue will is open to research results framed within this broad theme from a global perspective and highlighting the wide diversity of related phenomena, with the aim of bringing into dialogue the various theoretical and methodological frameworks used for its study. All of the different approaches linked to the historical study of scientific culture will be considered: intellectual history, history of medicine, history of anthropology, history of archaeology, historiography, museology, etc.
The aim is to seek for the complex interrelations between science and its manifestations in contexts of political authoritarianism and dictatorship, but also, more generally, to understand the mechanisms of conceptual subjugation and physical and violent subjection of bodies – both human and animal – through the imposition of scientific and pseudo-scientific theories as forms of the exercise of power, thus contributing to the history of the construction of the scientific disciplines in the contemporary world.
Within this framework, the special issue is open to papers addressing any of the following thematic lines or any related ones:
- The instrumentalisation of science in contexts of political authoritarianism and dictatorship.
- Mechanisms of disciplinary subjugation of bodies, health, and sexuality.
- Imposition or promotion of pseudo-scientific, racist, and eugenic theories in authoritarian political contexts.
- Conceptualisation, appropriation and forced circulation of animals and human beings with scientific justification (taxonomic studies and collections, taxidermy, public exhibition of people and animals, etc.).
- Academic manifestations of resistance to hegemonic paradigms in authoritarian contexts.
The deadline for submissions is June 30th, 2025. Articles must follow to the journal’s publication guidelines. Submission will be made through the journal’s platform, which can be accessed through the website https://revistas.usal.es/uno/index.php/1989-9289/
Special issue (16, 2025) | Museums: objets, communities & new Narratives
Coords.: Alejandra Sánchez Polo (Universidad de Valladolid) & Jimena Muhlethaler Chango (Reinwardt Academy)
Deadline for submissions: 30 / 06/ 2024
Museums: objets, communities & new Narratives
The new museum definition, approved in 2022 by the International Council of Museums (ICOM), portrays institutions of educational nature, which carry out preservation, research, dissemination and interpretation tasks of various types of heritage, while promoting a growing shift towards communities.
However, and despite the agenda implied in this definition, the institutional dimension of the museum, the nature of the collections in its custody, their role in the safeguarding of tangible and intangible knowledge and the core discourses that they produce are being contested worldwide by individuals and collectives. These actions take issue with matters of form and substance: museums are expected to turn towards inclusivity, multivocality, sustainability and intersectionality.
Thus, iconic venues of colonial or national collecting have gone through a series of interventions promoted by civil society. Museums are the stage of protest actions for the environment and social justice. They are also responsible for processing restitution and repatriation requests from communities and states from the global south which seek to amplify voices that have been historically excluded from these exhibition spaces.
The forthcoming issue of the multidisciplinary journal El Futuro del Pasado aims to assess the tensions that museums are currently facing from the perspectives of history, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, and museology. We extend an invitation to communities, museum and heritage professionals, and researchers in the humanities and social sciences to participate with critical and innovative proposals that investigate the role of museums as spaces for the construction of social and historical narratives, and the ongoing revisions of the past driven by communities, collective stakeholders and museums.
The proposed topics include (but are not limited to):
- From cabinet of curiosities to a space of contestation: historical analysis on the evolution of museums.
- Shifts, perspectives and challenges derived from the new museum definition.
- Museums and history: interventions in social memory, new approaches to national or grand narratives, explorations of the tension between past and present, experiences on the practice of decoloniality, critical perspectives on museum history.
- Gender and museums: proposals with a gender perspective.
- Museums and new pedagogies: educational proposals and museum-community dialogues, with historical perspective.
- Museums as spaces for the protection of living memory and popular art.
- New ways of exhibiting: curatorial approaches, co-creation, participatory experiences.
- Analysis of exhibition spaces and their diverse approaches to the past.
- Case studies of all the previously detailed sub-topics.
The deadline for submission of proposals is June 30th, 2024.
Articles must follow to the journal’s publication guidelines. Submission will be made through the journal’s platform, which can be accessed through the website https://revistas.usal.es/uno/index.php/1989-9289/