This special issue represents the first half of a collaboration between History+Technology and the Journal of the History of Biology. JHB co-editor Karen Rader has guest edited this issue of H + T, and in the coming months we will in turn present a set of articles in a special issue of JHB. The editors of both journals are excited to test the possibility that challenging familiar topical commitments can bring new criticality to all.
As we see it, this collaboration does more than historicize the engineering/science binary. Rather, it suggests that these two categories themselves enact historical projects like resource extraction, capitalism, socialism, the making of states, the making of life. When practical endeavors generally seen as ‘engineering’ are demarcated analytically from conceptual processes seen as ‘scientific discovery’ or ‘-research’ those historical projects, and their social origins and impacts, are easily obscured. To make histories of technology and biology–in all their institutional, political, material and corporeal expressions–accountable to one another is, we think, to make them accountable to history more generally.
Finally, not least among our reasons for swapping editorial labor in this way: we are thrilled to bring the readers of H + T a sampling of JHB’s ambitious analytical reach, and later, to introduce JHB readers to the historiographic aims, and disruptions, of H + T. We hope to see these two special issues shared widely within and beyond their familiar disciplinary homes, yielding new audiences, and new questions, for both.