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- Convenor:
-
Omkar Nadh Pattela
(University of Queensland)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores how new scientific fields emerge, stabilise, and become institutionalised. We invite empirical and comparative studies that trace the political and institutional work shaping these processes across different social, cultural, and local contexts.
Description
Scientific fields take form through situated practices, negotiations, and institutional work. This panel examines how new scientific fields emerge, stabilise, gain legitimacy, and become institutionalised across different political and cultural settings.
Classical frameworks have offered influential ways to understand these transformations. Thomas Kuhn described disciplinary change through paradigm shifts. Pierre Bourdieu examined science as a field of struggle over authority, legitimacy, and autonomy. Sheila Jasanoff’s notion of co-production highlighted how scientific and political orders are configured together. While these accounts remain powerful, they often stayed abstract and focused on a narrow range of Euro American examples.
In contrast, approaches such as national and sectoral systems of innovation describe the rise of new scientific and technological domains as rational and coordinated processes. By translating social and political dynamics into the language of systems and adaptation, these frameworks engage in a purification that renders invisible the politics and contestations inherent in scientific change.
This panel seeks empirically grounded studies that trace how new fields are assembled, negotiated, and institutionalised in practice. We particularly welcome comparative and situated analyses that examine epistemic politics through local histories, cultures, infrastructures, and political dynamics shaping the consolidation or fragmentation of emerging sciences. Examples such as synthetic biology, quantum technologies, planetary health, or sustainability research illustrate the kinds of transformations we seek to understand.
By foregrounding detailed empirical accounts, the panel seeks to clarify how scientific fields are configured through contestations over legitimacy, authority, and knowledge, and how these struggles shape the institutional and epistemic trajectories of emerging sciences