Scientific objects! What are they good for?
I’m going to try to articulate why studying scientific objects matters. I’m going to talk about why we study objects in the first place, how this started out, and how we study scientific objects today.
Author: Osnat Katz Moon
PhD student with UCL and the Science Museum; space history, public engagement and all kinds of other fun stuff
On material culture and legibility
As I write about material culture – the study of the things that people make and what it can tell us about our cultures – in my thesis, I’m conscious that I’m trying to balance two different aspects of material culture at once. One is material culture as a thing that academics write about – […]
Scientific Objects and Emotion
Scientific objects are different enough from the things you might find in your house and home that academics treat them differently. But is that the right approach?
Science is stored in the scientists
Science is pretty damn personal.
The moral economy
Sometimes, you look at why people do things and you think “why on earth are they doing this?”.
Expertise, imposter syndrome and Rice Krispies
There are a couple of things I’d like to unpack in this blogpost: the feelings of not being a “real” expert, how they come about, and what someone might be able to do about them.
What Goes Unsaid
The important parts of an oral history, I think, are as much about what people don’t say as anything else.
What can we learn from printed circuit boards?
This is a post that mainly exists because my research has thrown me a curveball and I need to think out loud about what I’m doing. I research the history of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, a space lab housed in a Victorian mansion in the middle of nowhere. (Yes, really.) Part of my research […]
Is quantitative always better?
When it really comes down to it, the wild success of mathematics in describing physical concepts is what makes it matter so much. The mythologies and folk legends that have sprung up around the history of science tell us that it was mathematics that led us out of our ignorant state, that it was quantitative […]
The many violences of ableism
I’ve not usually had to add content warnings to my posts, but in this session we discussed death, dying, suicide and genocide. Not only is that a lot to cover in an hour, it’s also quite heavygoing. Friday 15th marked the last Science and Disability reading group of the decade. To be fair, this isn’t […]
