Conference "The international circulation of scientific and cultural products: openings and obstacles"

« ESSE » Network - II - Translation and international circulation of ideas

Location : IUKB - Sion (Suisse) [ 21-23 September 2006 ]

Direction : F. Schultheis

Abstract : The second big colloquium of the ESSE network will be consecrated to the question of social conditions which help or impede transnational exchanges between researchers in social sciences. It is about updating the process of historical emergence of a European scientific community, analyzing the individual or institutional actors playing an essential role in the process of internationalization of both, production and circulation of scientific and cultural goods. Another goal is finally to show the barriers and filters which have contributed to the endurance of intellectual ethnocentrism and self importance of the national scientific communities. Thus, the colloquium aims at identifying a better way to master the social conditions which make a united European research space possible. This conference is also to realize a systematic exchange in order to get around the typical opening and enclosing in European social sciences. The exchange will be prepared by two thematic sub networks. The assembled researchers are to perform a collective work on the social history of European social sciences, emphasizing the circulation of ideas and concepts and also the transnational diffusion of the achieved knowledge. Researchers coming together from a great number of countries are to examine in thematic workshops the ways of transnational circulation of theoretic concepts, the translations and retranslations during their diffusion outside their context of emergence and the strategies of reception of “foreign” scientific products recognizable in the different national contexts. They will look particularly at the policies of translation and publishing of foreign works, at the given or refused institutional help and the key role played by certain organizations (Foundations, European institutes, etc.) and at the overture of a transnational market of scientific products. An essential question is the relation between European and American social sciences and the part of latter in the international circulation of ideas. Other topics for the workshops are: The role of the exile of Jewish scientists and intellectuals between 1933 and 1945 for the establishment of an international space for a circulation of ideas, the international circulation of students, the reopening of national spaces of scientific production, etc.