Science and its Audience(s)

Organised by

• Department of Economics
• Department of History
• Department of Law
• Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies
• Presidency
• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• Department of Political and Social Sciences
• Florence School of Transnational Governance
• Crisis of Expert Knowledge and Authority

Around 1890 there were no university chairs, no lectures, and no courses dealing with Imperial History, Geography, Economic History or International Relations in all of Great Britain. Over the course of the next three decades this changed. This enlargement of the university system was accomplished by a small group of like-minded individuals, who were driven by the desire to prepare the British Empire for the challenges of the twentieth century. They were convinced that the Empire needed to change its policies in order to survive, but that change presupposed secured acquiescence of both decision makers and general public.

Miloš Vojinovic aims to demonstrate how "science was used to acquire intellectual authority for a political project. Moreover, the goal is to show how the thin line between "scientific truths and ideological distortions was transgressed in a specific way precisely because the disciplinary founders produced knowledge with a polemical purpose, motivated by a desire to rebalance the attention of relevant audiences and canalise their behaviour. Vojinovic hopes to point to the dynamics that existed between chronological, thematic and spatial predilections of the disciplinary pioneers and the audiences they hoped to reach.