What does a labor history of science look like?

The university has become, in recent years, a testing ground for many of the debates playing out in society at large. The organized labor of graduate student unions and the defunding of the humanities in favor of STEM programs, for instance, are just two of the currents running through the modern university whose effects are felt even outside of the academy. The December 2023 issue of Isis responds to some of these pressing issues with a Focus collection of articles entitled “Let’s Get to Work: Bringing Labor History and the History of Science Together.” In proposing a “labor history of science,” interweaving the history of science with the history of labor, the collection hopes to re-politicize scientific study, and, ultimately, to stimulate broader social change.

The section opens with “Scientific Capital and Scientific Labor” by Harun Küçük. In this entry, Küçük “analyzes science as a form of capital, bound up with material conditions and subjective experiences of exploitation,” and calls for a framework of science that de-emphasizes credit and the exceptionalism it has historically bestowed. Gabriela Soto Laveaga, in “Worker Once Known: Thinking with Disposable, Discarded, and Precariously Employed Laborers in History of Science,” unearths the contributions of marginalized workers from a historical record that has often concealed them. In “Mutual Aid: The Workers’ History of Science,” Laura Stark examines “the ways in which academic labor relations have been projected onto histories of how nature is conceived,” and imagines a history of science inspired by a model of nature as “dynamic mutual aid” rather than as “tooth-and-claw competition.”

Isis has previously published other Focus collections on such topics as resources in the early modern world, Chinese local gazetteers, and the history of science in the Anthropocene. Uniquely, this Isis Focus section on the labor history of science is published in coordination with special issues of History of Science and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History devoted to the same theme.

This Isis Focus collection considers the interests shared by contemporary science and labor historians. Science historians have begun studying previously neglected sites like kitchens, slave plantations, and ship decks, as well as previously ignored worker groups like laboratory technicians and contract employees. Labor historians, meanwhile, have moved away from the entrenched binaries of their intellectual tradition, such as that of class versus race, or of work as voluntary versus coerced. Instead, these thinkers have devoted new energy to the study of more entangled formations like racial capitalism and global networks of migration and dispossession. Yet despite the resonance of these research endeavors there has been little academic engagement between science history and labor history. Observing this missed connection, the Focus collection and the special issues of History of Science and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History bring together articles that unite the two fields. The editors of these three journals hope that this collaborative release will provoke reinvigorated discussion of the political power of scientific inquiry. They write, “the task of history is relentlessly to question the world we’ve inherited… So that’s the provocation. Let’s get to work.”