Varieties of Popular Science and the Transformations of Public Knowledge: Some Historical Reflections
Varieties of Popular Science and the Transformations of Public Knowledge: Some Historical Reflections
复制标题
科普的多样性和公共知识的转变：一些历史反思
作者：
Andreas W. Daum
本文建议，我们应该把各种各样的“大众科学”理解为一个更大的现象的一部分：跨越时间、空间和文化产生和转化公共知识的一系列不断变化的过程、实践和行为者。通过这样的重新概念化，我们既可以去本质化又可以历史化“大众化”的概念，使其摆脱规范性概念，并超越学术界现有的不平衡。因此，公共知识的历史可能会在现代世界的许多基本叙述中占据中心地位。更具体地说，本文建议我们更加关注“科学”领域之外的知识形式，在跨国范围内以及在比较的视角下接受公共知识的丰富性、交通和转移，并重新思考传统的分期形式。
This essay suggests that we should understand the varieties of “popular science” as part of a larger phenomenon: the changing set of processes, practices, and actors that generate and transform public knowledge across time, space, and cultures. With such a reconceptualization we can both de‐essentialize and historicize the idea of “popularization,” free it from normative notions, and move beyond existing imbalances in scholarship. The history of public knowledge might thus find a central place in many fundamental narratives of the modern world. More specifically, the essay proposes that we pay more attention to forms of knowledge outside the realm of “science,” embrace the richness, traffic, and transfer of public knowledge on a transnational scale as well as in comparative perspective, and rethink conventional forms of periodization.