10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17458
By recalling his own career as an historian of science and technology, the author sketches the history of Science and Technology Studies in Italy from their early steps in the 1970s and 1980s. He highlights the ways in which the field has gained visibility and substance in the Italian context, but also pointing out the constraints and hurdles that still must be overcome to consolidate it. In particular, the author underlines how the traditionally rigid disciplinary partitions of Italian academia and the nationally centralized system of Italian universities have hindered, and still hinder, the institutionalization and the potential impact of STS south of the Alps.
application/pdf
2038-3460
17458
1
en
Giuliano Pancaldi
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
academia
What Can We Learn from the History of STS in Italy? A Few Hints for the Future
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
11
Anniversary Reflections
2020-11-12
2023-06-26
2020-11-12
2023-10-12
35-42
TS
Giuliano Pancaldi
2020/11/12
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17458
35
Università di Bologna
2038-3460
1
academia
en
42
What Can We Learn from the History of STS in Italy? A Few Hints for the Future
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17458/16305
11
                                                            Anniversary Reflection
                                                                                         35




What Can We Learn from the
History of STS in Italy? A Few Hints
for the Future
Giuliano Pancaldi
Università di Bologna



    Abstract: By recalling his own career as an historian of science and tech-
    nology, the author sketches the history of Science and Technology Studies
    in Italy from their early steps in the 1970s and 1980s. He highlights the ways
    in which the field has gained visibility and substance in the Italian context, but
    also pointing out the constraints and hurdles that still must be overcome to
    consolidate it. In particular, the author underlines how the traditionally rigid
    disciplinary partitions of Italian academia and the nationally centralized sys-
    tem of Italian universities have hindered, and still hinder, the institutionaliza-
    tion and the potential impact of STS south of the Alps.

    Keywords: STS; History of Science; Italy; Interdisciplinary studies;
    academia.

    Submitted: May 6, 2020 – Accepted: May 30, 2020

    Corresponding author: Giuliano Pancaldi, University of Bologna, Italy.
    Email: giuliano.pancaldi@unibo.it




    As an historian of science and technology with an interest in STS dating
back to the early 1970s, I want to contribute to this anniversary issue of
Tecnoscienza with some reflections combining a long-term perspective on
the field and a few hints on how to sustain its further development in the
future. The reflections and the hints, hopefully, will benefit from a less-
than-cursory experience in the joint venture of historians of science and
STS scholars in different countries over the past fifty years.
    A former engineering student with a passion for the history and philos-
ophy of science, in 1970 I ended up with a philosophy of science “laurea”
degree, based on a dissertation on a history of science topic with some sig-
nificant social implications, that I addressed from a moderate socialist
standpoint. There were no substantive academic opportunities for histori-
ans of science in Italian universities in those days. Unhappy with the kind
 TECNOSCIENZA
 Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
 11 (1) pp. 35-42 - ISSN 2038-3460
 www.tecnoscienza.net                                2020
36                                                          Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

of logical positivism prevailing among Italian philosophers of science, I was
attracted by what I regarded as the promising, recent developments in the
history of science as practiced in the United Kingdom and USA. Such de-
velopments displayed a growing attention for the social history of science
and for what were then called “science studies”. In 1971 a new journal by
that name – renamed Social Studies of Science a few years later – was
launched in London. The two editors were from two different, recently
established research units pursuing the kind of topics I found fascinating.
Roy MacLeod was based at the time at the University of Sussex, where the
Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) had been established in 1966. David
Edge was at the University of Edinburgh, where the Science Studies Unit
had been created in 1964, thanks to a grant from the Wolfson Foundation.
A few years earlier Edward Shills, an American sociologist with an interest
in science policy who participated on both sides of the Atlantic in what was
later called the cultural Cold War, had established the journal Minerva. A
Review of Science, Learning and Policy (1962).
    In the early 1970s another, significant playground of the cultural Cold
War was launched that proved important for the early history of STS. It
was supported by UNESCO and cultivated by historians and sociologists
of science interested in a dialogue across the Iron Curtain. The 13th Inter-
national Congress of the History of Science, meeting in Moscow under the
auspices of UNESCO in 1971, saw the formation of an International Coun-
cil for Science Policy Studies whose members represented institutions
ranging from Paris, Harvard and MIT to Moscow and India, as well as
scholars from western and eastern Europe and Latin America. There were
no Italians on the Council. One lasting product of the initiative was a fas-
cinating, massive volume published by SAGE in 1977 under the title Sci-
ence, Technology and Society. A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective. Edited by
Ina Spiegel-Rösing and Derek de Solla Price, the book is regarded as the
first of the several STS “handbooks” we are now familiar with (Spiegel-
Rösing and de Solla Price 1977).
    Back in 1971, another seminal book in the field had been published by
Jerome R. Ravetz, then at Leeds University: Scientific Knowledge and its
Social Problems (Ravetz 1971). In the meantime at University College,
London, and other British universities, the Wellcome Trust – a research-
charity established by an American-born British pharmaceutical entrepre-
neur – supported the introduction of research units and teaching positions
devoted to the social history of medicine and human health. University
College already had a Department of History and Philosophy of Science
and in 1994 it became today’s Department of Science and Technology
Studies.
    Nothing comparable was happening south of the Alps in those same
years. Within the slow-moving, centralized, ministry-approved, Italian hi-
erarchy of academic disciplines, it was not until 1979 that there were un-
ambiguous signs of the history of science being recognized as a new field.
In the national academic context, the social history of science often met
Pancaldi                                                                   37

with skepticism bordering on hostility.
    However, thanks to frequent travel and a 1979 scholarship from the
British Academy-Wolfson Foundation that I spent in London, in 1980 I
was asked by Roy MacLeod to write a “country report” for Social Studies
of Science focusing on “The history and social studies of science in Italy”
(Pancaldi 1980). The burden for the author on such an occasion was to try
to explain to foreign colleagues why – despite the often vibrant, occasion-
ally fierce Italian public debates on “science and society”, often involving
internalist versus externalist historians and natural scientists, many in-
spired by a Marxist agenda – no new research units, journals or other sig-
nificant publishing initiatives devoted to the social studies of science were
being launched.
    It took a few years, and some flank movements on my side, to convince
senior Italian academics that there might be room at our state-run univer-
sities for the kind of social history of science that I was practicing. Having
secured a tenured position at home, I was able to expand the international
networking that appeared to me the main way to develop the convergence
of the history of science and social studies of science, that I found so stim-
ulating in the works of a growing number of British and American col-
leagues, and help circulate it in the peninsula.
    In 1986, a Fulbright scholarship allowing me to spend a semester as a
visiting scholar in the Office for History of Science and Technology at the
University of California, Berkeley, offered additional yarn from which to
weave experiments at networking and institutional change. The Office had
been created in 1973 with the aim, among others, of maintaining close ties
between historians of science and the powerful natural sciences community
for which Berkeley was known worldwide. John Heilbron, trained as a
physicist and head of the Office, had worked as Thomas Kuhn’s assistant.
Heilbron was later critical of Kuhn’s work and influence, but in those years
he edited a journal, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, that at its
launch in 1969 was intended by founder Russell McCormmach to pursue
“the synthesis of the intellectual and social history of science that must
come” (McCormmach 1969, viii). Taking the helm of the journal in 1980,
Heilbron himself had declared: “McCormmach’s resolve to bridge internal
and external history has entered the ethos of the profession…” (Heilbron
1980, ii).
    In Berkeley in 1986, in dialogue with John Heilbron, the idea developed
of establishing an International Summer School in History of Science along
the lines of similar schools popular among physicists. Beginning in 1988,
the Summer School met in Bologna, Uppsala, and Berkeley in rotation,
with Paris to be added later. Of the scholars in charge of the school, two
were born before WWII (Heilbron, Berkeley, and Tore Frängsmyr, Upp-
sala), and two after the war (Pancaldi, Bologna, and Dominique Pestre,
Paris). The four represented, as it were, two different generations of schol-
ars, with the latter feeling much closer to the social studies of science and
STS that were putting down roots in many English-language universities.
38                                                           Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

The students admitted to the school – doctoral students and post-docs –
reflected the agenda and moods of a somewhat divided but thriving field
of study. The school’s ten one- or two-week-long sessions held between
1988 and 2006 attracted more than three hundred students from eighteen
countries. Those attending the 2004 School in Bologna will long remember
the passionate discussions that followed Dominique Pestre’s lecture on
“Thirty years of science studies” (Pestre 2004) and Jan Golinski’s on “Mak-
ing natural knowledge” (Golinski 1998).
    For the young Italian scholars in attendance, the school brought net-
working opportunities and the welcome breath of fresh air that lively inter-
national meetings carry with them. But of course, more was needed for the
field to catch on and begin growing roots within the Italian university sys-
tem. Only the creation of research units and teaching programs specifically
devoted to the new field could offer hopes of establishing it in a lasting
way. The example provided in those years by universities abroad was clear.
In 1988, the MIT Faculty approved their new STS doctoral program. Still
active today, the program partners with historians and anthropologists to
train researchers in the “historical, cultural, social, political and economic
dimensions of science, technology and medicine across the globe.”1 The
2002 establishment of the Harvard program on “Science, Technology &
Society” sent a similar message. Other such programs currently active in
the USA include the Berkeley Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies,
and similar programs at Cornell, Wisconsin-Madison, Michigan, and Vir-
ginia Tech.
    In Italian universities, Ph.D. programs in any discipline were first intro-
duced as late as the mid-1980s, when I was just being appointed as profes-
sor of the History of science at the University of Bologna, without the re-
quirement of a Ph.D. Convinced that doctoral studies were indeed a crucial
experience and cherishing the prospect of writing my next book in English,
I took the step – unusual for a professor – of becoming a doctoral student
again. I earned my Ph.D. (DPhil, as they call it) from the University of Ox-
ford under Robert Fox, who practiced a history of science that I found
congenial as it combined close attention to scientific content and a deep
awareness of institutional and social contexts.
    My efforts at networking and institutional bricolage continued. In 1991,
I took advantage of the euphoria generated in Bologna by the recent fes-
tivities celebrating 900 years since the foundation of the university to
launch an International Centre for the History of Universities and Science.
Still in operation, the Centre allowed the kind of regular hosting of foreign
visiting scholars that the Summer School could not provide. It also made it
somewhat easier to attract local, national, and European funds to support
young researchers interested in exploring new avenues of research. It took
many years, however, to convince colleagues at the University of Bologna
that the most urgent step needed to catch up with what was happening
abroad was to launch a doctoral program adopting some of the features
characterizing the STS programs prospering elsewhere. A full academic
Pancaldi                                                                     39

year spent at MIT and the Harvard Department of History of Science
thanks to a Dibner Fellowship in 2002-2003 confirmed my convictions.
Back in Bologna, a small step in the hoped-for direction occurred in 2005
when cultural anthropologists agreed to host an annual course of lectures
on the Anthropology of Science and Technology (in 2009 the name was
changed to Social Studies of Science). The course became quite popular
among students from both the humanities and the natural sciences.
     I pursued a connected line of intervention as a member of the national
and local committees selecting candidates for new academic positions in
Italian universities. This consisted in attracting back to Italy several Italian
colleagues who had completed their studies abroad in areas akin to the so-
cial history of science and STS. As part of the same strategy, I also encour-
aged several of my students to continue their doctoral studies abroad.
     In 2007, finally, a new Ph.D. program was launched at the University
of Bologna, hosted by the department I was attached to: the Philosophy
Department. The title adopted – Science, Technology, and Humanities –
reflected the program’s aspiration of combining the humanities, deeply
rooted in the local tradition, with the natural sciences and technology. In
its early days faculty members supporting the program came from physics,
mathematics, the biomedical sciences, engineering, and economics as well
as philosophy and the humanities. The program also benefited from coop-
eration agreements with scholars from the Universities of Exeter and Kon-
stanz. The new Ph.D. program attracted a fair number of students from
several countries each year. As time went by, however, the combined pres-
sure exerted by both local and ministerial diffidence towards the interdis-
ciplinary character of the program – atypical vis-à-vis the deep divide sep-
arating the humanities and social sciences from the natural sciences and
technology within the institutional setting of Italian universities – pre-
vailed. Such pressure eventually led the denomination of the program and
the composition of its faculty to be changed. Currently, “Philosophy and
Science Studies” is only one of the three curricula available to students,
and the program no longer maintains close ties with faculty from outside
the humanities and social sciences.
     Around the year 2000, a new source of potential support for projects
pursuing the kind of interdisciplinary agenda sketched above became avail-
able from the European Union through its cultural programs. My own ex-
perience with one such program, “Culture 2000”, was satisfactory on sev-
eral accounts. It made it possible to organize conferences and publications
on “nature, culture and identities” through a joint initiative by scholars in
the social and natural sciences belonging to the universities of Heidelberg,
Louvain-la-Neuve, Montpellier and Salamanca, as well as Bologna.
     Another major, potential source of support for the kind of interdisci-
plinary research agenda I am talking about materialized with the creation
in 2007 of the European Research Council. With the declared goal of sus-
taining research in all fields of science and scholarship, and having adopted
a system of panels and disciplinary sectors for the selection process more
40                                                             Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

frugal and flexible than the one in force in Italian universities, the ERC had
the potential to facilitate comparatively new interdisciplinary fields such as
STS make their way south of the Alps. In recent years, undoubtedly, the
competition among Italian universities in their effort to attract ERC recip-
ients and funds has allowed some scholars with substantial experience in
STS abroad to return and secure tenured positions in Italy. It is probably
too early, however, to say whether the inflow will have an impact on the
traditionally rigid disciplinary partitions of Italian academia.


Conclusions

    So, what can we learn from the history of STS in Italy? Are there any
hints to be drawn as to how best to sustain its further development in the
future?
    In the Italian context, more than elsewhere, young academic fields need
a pouch if they are to conquer spaces in universities and research institu-
tions. In the early steps discussed above, in the 1970s and 1980s, the ‘kan-
garoo’ offering STS a lift was the history of science which, in turn, was
taking on a degree of autonomy from the philosophy of science and the
history of philosophy, fields that at the time benefitted from their earlier
establishment in Italian universities. In more recent years, if we judge from
surveys such as the one outlined by Attila Bruni as President of STS Italia
in 2012, the kangaroo supporting the penetration of STS in Italy has been,
above all, sociology (Bruni 2012).
    Useful and indeed necessary as they are, lifts such as these also bear
certain costs. During the earlier period, Italian scholars interested in STS
had to either publish abroad or adjust to the topics, style and jargon pre-
vailing in the kangaroo disciplines prevailing in Italy. In the more recent
season of Italian STS, something similar is happening with sociology.
    The situation described entails additional costs. Several of the early STS
research centers and doctoral programs established in English-language
universities were, and often still are, the fruit of joint initiatives by scholars
from the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, and
medicine. Those centers and programs continue to benefit from a compar-
ative ease of movement among the different fields made available to doc-
toral students and faculty members when they build their careers in those
universities. That does not apply to Italian STS in the same measure. A
significant portion of the literature produced by scholars active in English-
language STS centers and programs is conceived keeping in mind the com-
paratively broad audiences constituted by scholars and readers from a
range of different disciplinary backgrounds. A similar goal is achieved in
those countries through the policies pursued by the main university
presses. When transforming a Ph.D. dissertation into a book meant for
those presses, scholars are expected to adopt arguments and a language
appropriate for broader audiences. The growing number of articles that
Pancaldi                                                                       41

English-language STS scholars publish in magazines and websites meant
for a general public is producing a similar result. Once again, such condi-
tions do not apply to the same degree within Italian academe or among
Italian publishers.
    On a deeper level, the power accumulated by the kangaroo disciplines
through the nationally centralized, rigid hierarchy of disciplinary arrange-
ments in force in Italian universities has the effect of discouraging younger
generations of scholars from adopting the more innovative, ambitious goals
typical of comparatively new fields, like STS. When it comes to launching
or supporting new STS initiatives, the all too limited autonomy that indi-
vidual state universities are willing to claim from the ministry in Rome and
from the national evaluation agency represents an additional and powerful
constraint. Together with the permanently inadequate, public and private
resources devoted to scientific research, this is yet another circumstance
pointing to the fact that – as I have argued elsewhere (Pancaldi 2020) – the
centralized, imagined national scientific community that Italian elites have
built since unification has backfired.
    Are not topics such as these urgently deserving to be studied by Italian
STS scholars?
    While waiting for the national problems to be addressed, we can find
some relief in a trend that involves us as members of the broader, interna-
tional STS community. A recent survey of the articles published in Nature
over the past fifty years found that “scientific work is ever more becoming
a mixture of disciplines”, and “the scientific endeavor increasingly inte-
grates across boundaries,” including the social sciences and humanities
(Gates et al. 2019, 34). Indeed, this trend appears to be confirmed by the
attention that journals such as Science have paid recently to the work of
scholars such as Bruno Latour.
    There was some emphasis in the title – “The Whole World is Becoming
Science Studies” – adopted for Latour’s 2018 interview published in ESTS
(Mazanderani and Latour 2018). The ecological crisis and debates on the
Anthropocene were mentioned at the time to support the message. Writing
today, we would of course add the Covid-19 pandemic to that list, and the
message would appear less emphatic than it did two years ago. For us here,
however, the question remains: how should we best equip Italian STS to
face the multiple challenges that defy the disciplinary and institutional
niches on which our universities and we ourselves have relied for so long?


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   Work Has Broad Impact, in “Nature”, 575, pp. 32-34.
Golinski, J. (1998) Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of
42                                                              Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

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1
    https://sts-program.mit.edu/academics/graduate-program/ (Accessed September
       7, 2020).
