Session Abstract

With the culturally and historically contingent character of science's claims to universality in view, this roundtable invites scholars representing a wide range of disciplinary perspectives to reflect on how we might construct scientific, medical, or technological ‘objects’ of translation, be they texts, images, communities, concepts, artifacts, or practices (including practices of translation). Participants will offer suggestions on how we might go about reconstructing the historical processes by which such entities move between one ground and another, whether in terms of theory and practice, verbal and visual, inside and outside, site 1 and site 2, language A and language B, and so on. Speakers will signal potential payoffs and difficulties in thinking translation, and end with a provocative question or challenge for an audience broadly interested in the problematics of translation as historical object and historical practice.