University of Cambridge > Talks.cam > Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science > Creating citizen history of science: science, fiction and the future of the 20th century

Creating citizen history of science: science, fiction and the future of the 20th century

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If you have a question about this talk, please contact Agnes Bolinska.

If something isn’t real, or true – if it’s (whisper it) fake – then, other than to debunk it, it can sometimes be hard to see why you should study it. By focusing on the histories of the future, this paper will show how the humanities, and in particular the history of science, can engage with the unreal, the fictional and the imaginary. By doing this, we will show how the idea of ‘expertise’ and the figure of the ‘expert’ can be interpreted more broadly, and indicate ways in which non-historians can influence the structure and shape of academic histories. We will begin by exploring these ideas in relation to science fiction, the nature of fictional realities and the impact of the imaginary on academic disciplines, and we will end (we hope) with a game in which players can reconstruct – and sometimes redirect – the history of the 20th century.

This talk is part of the Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science series.

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