CFP: Epistemic Passages: Knowledge in Translation

 The board of the Society for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology (GWMT) invites you to the 2026 annual conference in cooperation with the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University and the Prague department of the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO).

The conference will take place 9–11 September 2026 in Prague and will focus on the theme:

Epistemic Passages: Knowledge in Translation

Taking the opportunity of convening in a city that over centuries experienced has the positive as well as the negative aspects of the encounter of different cultures, confessions, ideologies, or nations, the GWMT annual conference will focus on scholarly translation practices and their consequences. While translation is usually associated with so-called natural languages, our conference will extend beyond this to include knowledge moving across time, space, ideologies, religions and confessions, technical and media environments or between scholars and laypeople.

We want to focus on the dynamics of knowledge in transit and its interrelations with the settings it traverses and/or newly creates as it travels. How does knowledge become rewritten and reconceptualized to new contexts after years of being forgotten in dusky libraries? How does it change when it is appropriated into new confessional, social or ideological contexts? How does it change while travelling from discipline to discipline (as, e.g. from medicine to the humanities or vice versa)? How do scholars rewrite the knowledge of laypeople – and how do non-academics transform academic knowledge into one that is accessible for them and their networks? How does (academic) knowledge change when it is applied into practice? How is translation of knowledge technically mediated and informed?

Not only practices, but also specific understandings of translation are consequential. Assumed universality of scholarly knowledge, that only changed its attire while in transit, with facts or theories supposedly travelling without changing their content through languages, cultures, or disciplinary dialects, has long informed the politics of science’s propagation and popularisation, prioritising the academic content of communicated science over its potential to be understood by the non-academic public. Various linear models of how knowledge travels across languages and cultures underlie the modernisation-theory-based approaches to the “spread” and “communication” of science, linking thus science’s history with its present.

Therefore, the conference equally asks about the different modes of understanding translation and scholarly thinking about translation (termed ‘translation knowledge’ by Lieven D’hulst and Yves Gambier) and their repercussions. Which different ‘translation knowledges’ exist in different disciplines and how do they change over time? Which different vocabularies of translation exist, and how do they resonate with those in other fields and disciplines? Which consequences do different ‘translation knowledges’ have for the understanding of science in science-reflexive disciplines (philosophy, history, sociology of science, etc.)? How do changes of ‘translation knowledge’ impact the politics of science, science communication, discussions on technology acceptance, or the involvement of laypeople into the knowledge production labelled as citizen science? Which new conceptual or technical tools are developed, or old tools adjusted, to accommodate the changes to ‘translation knowledge’?

We welcome applications for entire panels as well as individual contributions. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes in length. Sections consist of either four presentations or three presentations with commentary and last 120 minutes, including discussion. Applications for round-tables – a discussion-oriented format focusing on a common theme, consisting of up to five speakers and a moderator, allowing at least 60 minutes for general discussion – are explicitly encouraged. Please submit abstracts of approximately half a page in length using our submission form. For sections, a short introduction to the section should be submitted in addition to the abstracts of the individual presentations. If of equal quality, sections that span academic generations will be given preference. While the preference will be given to the applications that relate to the overall topic, we will accept applications on all topics of history of medicine, science, and technology.

Languages of the conference will be English and German.

Please submit proposals by 15 February 2026, using the online submission form on the GWMT website (www.gwmt.de). Please note: This is an in-person conference; exceptions are only possible for accessibility purposes.