Call for Papers Deadline: SPECIAL ISSUE (17, 2026) | SCIENCE AND POWER: AUTHORITARIANISM AND DISCIPLINARY PARADIGMS (19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES)

Coords.: Tomás Aguilera Durán (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) y Alejandra Palafox Menegazzi (Universidad de Granada)

Deadline for submissions:30 / 06/ 2025

This special issue will consider the different ways in which science and scientific culture operated as mechanisms of power in complex political contexts throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will address the strategies of control and regulation – conceived, reformulated or implemented in contemporary times – that had science as the argumentative axis or that made use of it, assessing their scope and effectiveness within the disciplinary paradigms of the time. It will also address any manifestations of resistance or challenging of their authoritarian enforcement.

The special issue will is open to research results framed within this broad theme from a global perspective and highlighting the wide diversity of related phe- nomena, with the aim of bringing into dialogue the various theoretical and meth- odological frameworks used for its study. All of the different approaches linked to the historical study of scientific culture will be considered: intellectual history, his- tory of medicine, history of anthropology, history of archaeology, historiography, museology, etc.

The aim is to seek for the complex interrelations between science and its mani- festations in contexts of political authoritarianism and dictatorship, but also, more generally, to understand the mechanisms of conceptual subjugation and physical and violent subjection of bodies – both human and animal – through the imposition of scientific and pseudo-scientific theories as forms of the exercise of power, thus contributing to the history of the construction of the scientific disciplines in the contemporary world.

Within this framework, the special issue is open to papers addressing any of the following thematic lines or any related ones:

• The instrumentalisation of science in contexts of political authoritarianism and dictatorship.
• Mechanisms of disciplinary subjugation of bodies, health, and sexuality.
• Imposition or promotion of pseudo-scientific, racist, and eugenic theories
  in authoritarian political contexts.
• Conceptualisation, appropriation and forced circulation of animals
  and human beings with scientific justification (taxonomic studies and
  collections, taxidermy, public exhibition of people and animals, etc.).
• Academic manifestations of resistance to hegemonic paradigms in
  authoritarian contexts.