We are pleased to announce continuation of the working group on the History of the Language Sciences, hosted by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Meetings will take place via Zoom on the second Tuesday of each month at 9:00 Eastern in the upcoming academic year. This year, presentations and discussions will focus on archives in the history and historiography of the language sciences (linguistic anthropology notably included). The co-conveners welcome proposals for presentations as well as general group participation.
Archives scaffold research in both in history and the sciences. Far from passive repositories, they assert order and give shape to the world. In the midst of what feels like daily media revolutions, archives have attracted widespread interest from historians of science in recent years. “The archive” has been newly re-conceptualized as a cross-disciplinary focus of reflection and analysis. At the same time, political impulses to decolonize the archive, alongside the ambitions and anxieties made possible by new media, have motivated highly specific interventions in the discipline of linguistics. From the corpora of computational linguistics to the digitization of resources documenting endangered languages, linguists have reckoned explicitly and enthusiastically with the affordances of their collections.
In the 2025-26 academic year, our working group will explore the relationship between these two traditions of thinking with and about archives. What can a cross-disciplinary perspective bring to bear on the uniqueness of archival practices in linguistics? Reciprocally, how might the particularities of linguistics inform the broader historiographic conversation around archives in the history of science? Do examples of linguistic corpora, for example, resist the notion that archives are inherently historical or not? How might conversations about governance in other fields relate to practices in linguistics? We look forward to exploring such questions with those who are interested from any disciplinary background.
Again, the co-conveners welcome proposals for presentations in the next season of our working group. Please get in contact with Judy Kaplan (jrk@chstm.org), Raúl Aranovich (raranovich@ucdavis.edu) or James McElvenny (james.mcelvenny@mailbox.org) for more information or to pitch a session on this theme. Thanks!
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