Mutual Aid

The Workers' History of Science

Bibliographic Data

ID3433773
AuthorsLaura Starks (0000-0002-3342-1712, Vanderbilt University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume114
Issue4
Pages841-849
Publication date2023-12-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueIsis (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-1753 • E-ISSN: 1545-6994
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/727645
OpenAlexW4389775416
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited15

Since around 2010, a workers' history of science has emerged as a distinct set of research questions and professional practices. More than a consolidation of prior concepts, the workers' history of science attends to resource distribution both in sites of science in the past and in present-day historians' sites of training and labor—the university, the library, the research organization, the professional meeting, and more. To understand the timing and trajectory of the workers' history of science, it is helpful to look at the history of "mutual aid." This example clarifies, first, how the workers' history of science is enlivening the historiography of science: by bringing to the past a form of analysis that was actively politically suppressed in the workplaces of history in the United States after World War II. It also shows how the workers' history of science can, in alliance with other movements, gradually transform the political economy of the profession—through small but consequential decisions about how to organize our shared professional worlds

Epistemology · History of science · Mutual aid · Political science · Sociology · History of Science and Medicine · History of Science and Natural History · Law · Philosophy · Twentieth Century Scientific Developments

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