Commentary
Violence and the public narratives of history of science
jas1010@cam.ac.uk
Abstract
The value of the humanities is severely limited by outmoded chronological frameworks, which continue to dominate public discussion and educational curricula while being rejected in current research. Even in adjacent academic fields, the history of science is often understood as a series of revolutions, particularly the much-criticised ‘Scientific Revolution’ of the 17th century. The view of science as a sequence of dramatic revolutions, famously articulated in the work of Thomas Kuhn, originated around 1900 in attempts to market a Eurocentric view of science-based industrial progress. It is, however, seriously misleading. The key issue is violence. The concept of scientific revolutions locates epistemic violence within specialist communities, obscuring the role of the sciences in colonial conquest and in silencing other ways of knowing. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)
Keywords
Scientific Revolutionhistory of scienceThomas Kuhnchronological frameworksviolencerevolutionCopyright statement
© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Secord, J.A. (2024), ‘Violence and the public narratives of history of science’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(3): a40 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a40crossref
dimensions
Article metrices
View count: 60
Download count: 4
No Data Found
No Data Found
No Data Found
This article examines the detrimental effects of Kenya’s wide-ranging policies, strategies and tactics of waging the war on terror at the Kenya coast. The ‘war’ is waged through police-related killings and enforced disappearances and is becoming counterproductive as it is contributing to a loss of citizenship rights for an increasing segment of the population. These grievances are rarely portrayed in the public sphere but continue to manifest in the suffering of families, livelihood losses, increased stigmatisation and, most importantly, through violation of the citizenship rights of widows and their orphaned children. Using interview data from the Kenya coast, the article attempts to shift beyond perceiving women and young people as perpetrators of violence to seeing them as silent victims of the war on terror. The article analyses these dynamics from community and civil society perspectives. It contributes to the emerging literature on women and violent extremism by examining the silent suffering of widows and their children, who often are neither seen nor heard.
No Data Found