The EXCHANGEACTIV project is part of this main project:
Exchange zones in the production and regulation of technoscience in the Iberian Peninsula: Academics, activists and the industry, 1930s-1990s
This coordinated project results from a long-term collaboration between the Institute for the History of Science (iHC) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and the López Piñero Interuniversitary Institute for Science Studies at the Valencia University. After nearly 25 years of collaborative research on the history of science in Spain, the coordinated project involving these groups is now led by younger researchers as Principal Investigators, has integrated renowned international scholars and has moved on to new disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transnational challenges.
While the past coordinated projects have focused on the publics of science, the circulation of science, the social construction of expertise and the study of ignorance, this new coordinated project goes a step further by broadening two historiographical concepts: contact zones and trading zones. These two concepts are articulated within the novel historiographical framework of exchange zones in order to include a wider array of actors, spaces and practices in the process of production and regulation of technoscience and to contribute to making the past (and the discipline) more inclusive in terms of gender, class or racialized minorities. The project focuses on those zones in which the academic world, the industrial world and citizens groups have historically come together to make (and occasionally de-make and re-make) scientific knowledge, technological artifacts and sociotechnical imaginaries.
This new coordinated project focuses on Spain and Portugal from the 1930s to the 1990s, paying special attention -as a novelty- to the period after the fall of the two long-lasting right-wing dictatorships and producing transnational narratives. The coordinated project is the result of two closely linked, articulated subprojects.
The subproject 1 Exchange zones of epistemic resistance and alternative innovation: Activism, grassroots movements and expertise, 1970s-1990s delves on the highly significant exchange zones between activists, grassroots groups and experts in the Iberian Peninsula during the last decades of the 20th century. Looking at them allows us to understand in a deeper historical perspective key current scientific debates that are strongly shaped by lay actors. This subproject focuses specifically on two interrelated domains (activism as an epistemic actor and activism as an innovation driver) and deals with three research lines (the environment, the body and the City)
The subproject 2 Exchange zones in the regulation of technoscience: Universities, industries and the public sphere deals with a rich variety of case studies to analyze interdisciplinary interactions among academic institutions, industries, and lay-people discussing safety and quality issues in Francos dictatorship (1930s-1975), and in the transition period towards democracy (1975-1990s). The subprojects approach to quality and safety encompasses various aspects of environmental, chemical, medical, agricultural and industrial history. It does so by focusing on pesticides, food, drugs, and other industrial products, and natural sites. This subproject developes the two following research lines: (1) negotiating safety and (2) negotiating quality.
All the project lines develop four transversal research dimensions : Invisible lay-actors; Cognitive emotions; Sociotechnical imaginaries; Transnational networks.