What happens when social scientists and historians meet and talk? This was the intellectual impetus for the theme of the sixth ISRF Annual Workshop which this year will be held in Berlin, with the title ‘Relating Pasts and Present: History of Science and Social Science’. For historians (and archaeologists), what constitutes knowledge and how (and by whom) it is produced is always specifically historically situated, while
social scientists, from anthropologists to psychologists, remind us that
there is always also a spatial or environmental element to knowledge. People across time and space cannot be expected to think or know in the same ways and by looking at how things change in historical perspective, we shed fresh light on global transformations more widely.
