Conference "The International Circulation of Ideas: Producers, Brokers and Agents"

« Circulation of ideas » Network - III - Internationalization

Location : Paris [ June 23-24 2006 ]

Direction : R. Lenoir

Abstract : If, as Pierre Bourdieu once said, ideas circulate “without carrying along the field of production in which they originate”, it is also possible to suggest that some ideas or intellectual products do not originate within national intellectual fields, but within international networks whose agents circulate and communicate across geographic and cultural borders. Migrations, exile, international institutions, professional mobility, international conferences, transnational politics represent a fertile field of cultural production that has not yet been analyzed as such. The impact of the “intellectual migration” from Europe to the United States in the 1930s and the 1940s, the reconstruction of European scientific networks by US philanthropic foundations after 1945, the international factors accounting for the reconfiguration of academic life in Latin America during the 1970s, or the emergence of a “neoliberal” international in the 1930s would be as many points in the case.

This international workshop aims at pursuing this intuition, by considering the “circulation” of ideas as a primary and constitutive feature of intellectual life, rather than a mere displacement of cultural products primarily shaped by their national context.

The workshop will be organized around three thematic sessions, each one focusing on a specific mode of internationalization of scientific productions: migrations, philanthropic foundations, political internationalism. The point is not to gather researchers working on the same objects, but to bring together people working on similar processes, in order to reach a more fine-tuned understanding of the mechanisms accounting for the international circulation of scientific ideas and of the social processes that underlie them.