Marco

Circu.I.T.I.N.G. – Circulation of Ideas and Things within Intellectual networks around the Globe aims to promote seminars, research activities, and dissemination practices focused on the circulation of ideas from a processual and historical perspective, with particular attention to the relationship between symbolic and material infrastructures and the role played by the formal and informal fields that codify the possibilities of ideational and scholarly exchange.

As suggested by our acronym, we aim at reconstructing the circuits through which ideas and things, and more generally cultural objects, are mobilized within globally-extended intellectual networks. If seen as scholarly fields, scientific and humanistic disciplines develop simultaneously a “national” dimension (as they emerge from connections and networks rooted in local traditions that have been organized, since the 19th century, in a close relationship to national institutional and governmental bodies) and a “transnational” dimension (as they are able to connect scholars from different geographic areas). What are the effects of the international extension—which does not mean, necessarily, a globalization—that affects the processes of creation, production, and circulation of ideas and other cultural objects? Can we describe and explain the relationships between the mobility of people (scholars and intellectuals, but also students and experts) and the mobility of ideas? More technically: what are the implications of the digital turn in terms of both the access to “dematerialized” sources and the growing availability of secondary literature—a process which raises questions of selection and capacity for critical comparison? And what is the relationship between the new ways of circulating ideas and the professional personas that intellectuals and intellectuals form of themselves as authors?

We will try to tackle these questions organizing two cycles of seminars and meeting, focused on two wide different but intertwined programs:

• The study of scientific and humanistic disciplines as historically-bounded spaces of expert knowledge production within which cultural objects—such as the products of social-historical research, which crystallize ideas, debates, and discoveries into different kinds of textual forms—are reflected upon, written down, circulated, and discussed. We understand the study of disciplines as focused on the infrastructures enabling scholarly and cultural exchanges: academic institutions; public and private research centers; publishing houses and their editors; networks of authors, readers, translators and critics; brokers who can circulate scholarly ideas to wider audiences, such as journalists, essayists, and science communicators;

• The relationship between material and digital cultural objects and the relevance of technologies in the practice of research, archiving, writing, and dialogue among scholars from different disciplines, with particular attention to the effects of the so-called “digital turn” on primary sources (e.g., with regard to their digitization and dematerialization) and secondary sources (e.g., with regard to the increasing availability of secondary literature, the ability to assess its quality and usefulness, and the selection options that arise in the face of its increase).

The two cycles will involve faculty members belonging to different institutions and disciplines, encouraging the participation of early career researchers, assignees and doctoral students, and complementing, where possible, the activities of the departmental Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility & Humanities (MOHU) and the Inter-University Center for Cultural History (CSC), with a view to consolidating existing relationships and creating future research collaborations and publication possibilities. In this regard, efforts will also be made to foster collaboration with the History of Sociology section (RC08) of the International Sociological Association (ISA), of which the PI of this project is vice president for the five-year period 2023-2027, by promoting joint initiatives on the historical study of disciplines and the relationship between digital sources and historical research.