Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 216.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2025-11-13 13:40:37+00:00
        From: Roberta Spada <roberta.spada.1@UNIPD.IT>
        Subject: HSS-ESHS 2026 - CfP Symposium “After Loss: Ephemeral Histories of Science and Technology”

Dear all,

We are happy to share our proposal for a Symposium at the next ESHS-HSS
Conference in Edimburgh (13-16 July 2026)
<https://hssonline.org/page/2026cfp>. We are currently looking for
contributors coming from HPS, STS, and Museum Studies/Material Culture
Studies with case studies from all time periods, from Antiquity and
Early Modern History to the Modern and Contemporary. Here's our
provisional abstract:

After Loss: Ephemeral Histories of Science and Technology

Technoscience has long been a way of building intellectual, social, and
material infrastructure to make the natural world knowable. And yet, the
history of science and technology is littered with lost objects,
forgotten theories, decayed specimens, obsolete instruments. What unites
these is not permanence, but ephemerality: whether they were designed to
last or to be consumed, they have now lost their form or their purpose.
What would it mean to put loss, so often peripheral to our dominant
epistemologies, at the centre of historical analysis? We invite
reflections on how disappearance, decay and absence may become sources
for plural histories of science.

  In early modern workshops, objects were continuously reworked,
disassembled and transformed. In courts and city streets, experiments
were staged, performed and just as quickly dismantled. More recently,
infrastructures of extractive modernity, like space exploration programs
and industrial pipelines, may be abandoned and survive unevenly across
global landscapes. Media obsolescence, both planned and unplanned,
threatens the durability of supports and software readability, preparing
future archival absences.

  This panel invites material, visual, and text-based histories that
confront the challenge of what is damaged, obscure, or even absent, such
as: demolished buildings, abandoned laboratories, broken instruments,
objects with no known provenance, histories of missing objects, ephemera
and infrastructural ruin, and extinct species.

How can loss be a source for the history of technoscience? By attending
to such absences, we aim to question whose knowledge is preserved, and
whose is lost. As loss is increasingly all around us, we encourage
scholars to reclaim ephemerality not as a failure, but as a feature of
the history of knowledge – and in doing so to bring forth histories that
resist ideas of linear progress and individual authority.

—
If you are interested in joining the Symposium or want to know more, do
contact us at roberta.spada.1@unipd.it and antonia.belli.19@ucl.ac.uk!
Abstract proposals (2000 characters max) can be submitted by 24 November
2025.

Best regards,
Roberta Spada and Antonia Belli


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