Journal of the History of Biology - Call for Papers for Topical Collection: Social History of Laboratory and Field Practices

Collection Editor: Megan Raby 

Please read our Author Instructions for Topical Collections (this opens in a new tab) to get further information about the submission, review and publishing process of Topical Collections.

The Journal for the History of Biology is pleased to announce the Call for Papers for a topical collection dedicated to the Social History of Laboratory and Field Practices. This collection will advance historical scholarship on the spatial practices of life scientists across the array of settings known as laboratories or field areas. Using space and place as analytic categories, the pieces chosen for this collection will explore the co-production of research sites, scientific knowledge, and biologists’ social and professional identities. 

We seek submissions that interrogate the categories of the “laboratory” and the “field,” as well as those that move beyond a lab-field dichotomy to examine the full range of practices that life scientists engage in indoors, outdoors, and in between. Papers may explore questions including, but not limited to: What types of spatial, social, and institutional formations enable particular types of knowledge and practice (e.g. long-term, place-based, experimental, etc.). How does place mediate relationships between scientists and non-scientists, and among researchers, technicians, and assistants? How do researchers and research organisms become entangled within the shared social worlds of scientific sites? What roles do technology or embodied knowledge play in materializing science in place? How might laboratories and fieldwork be theorized as forms of land use, or through the lens of labor, gender, or race? How do the micropolitics of biological labs and field areas interface with the macro-politics of colonialism, conservation and resource management, or business?

Especially welcome is scholarship that expands the geographical scope of the historiography of fieldwork and laboratories beyond its current emphasis on the United States and Europe. Likewise, we encourage the submission of scholarship that pushes methodological boundaries in our historical understanding of the situated nature of scientific knowledge about living things, linking the history of biology with, for example, perspectives from areas such as environmental history, animal studies, architectural history, geography, or political ecology.