This issue of History + Technology (H + T) represents the first to be prepared under our editorial direction as a Special Issue; that is, as a set of articles chosen by outside editors to engage with a single theme or debate. We are very excited to provide a platform for the challenging methodological and historiographic thinking such projects can involve and to share this special issue edited by Gabriela Soto Laveaga and Pablo Gómez. We believe that the editors’ and authors’ deeply critical focus on the prevailing tropes of so-called global histories of science, technology and medicine will contribute to a great many ongoing conversations.
We hope that readers will find the pieces in this issue to be as provocative and agile in their analyses as we have. To our eyes, the articles – framing ‘multi-sided knowledges’ and the ontologies and spatialities amidst which those take shape – encourage both substantive historical reframings and an unusual level of reflexivity. Crucially, the issue’s editors and authors ask that we step away from constructions of ‘non-EuroAmerican’ histories as ‘missing’ from academic scholarship and instead consider that such impulses towards inclusion can themselves reproduce privileges and marginalities. Binaries not just of Western and non-Western, but of center and periphery, inside and outside, and global and local carry profoundly political implications for our causal explanations of past events. This critical outlook seems to us useful well beyond the writing of histories of science, technology and medicine, and indeed beyond the writing of history, to support the address of social relations in the academy in 2018.
Eurocentric historicism may be a stance with which few readers of H + T identify, but questioning exactly how our sociabilities shape our historical projects and our understanding of others’ intellectual labor seems an invaluable pursuit. We welcome readers to approach this special issue with these broadest concerns in mind, and to share their own critical historical and historiographic projects with the H + T community.