The geography of scientific production and networks. An analysis of geography congresses in reunified Germany
Résumé
Aims.
During the Cold War, the world as well as Germany were divided into two blocs. Whereas previous historiography has highlighted that the relations between them were hindered by many obstacles (in politics but also in science – which was a rather strategic field), new research emphasizes on transnational history of the Cold War sciences. This oral presentation aims to question how the distance between GDR and FRG geographers’ networks played into the German scientific reunification. More broadly, it addresses the issue of how geopolitics impacts science.
Methodology and data.
The mixed-methods study behind the presentation is based on both GDR and FRG geographical congresses archives from the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography and archives of the “Wissenschaftsrat” (German Council of Science and Humanities), accessed in March and April 2018. It used analyses of texts, cartography, graph theory and longitudinal approach, and combined methods both based on individuals and space. The main experiment is based on bipartite networks made from the archives data. These networks of co-participation to conference panels are spatialized (each conference takes place in a city and each geographer comes from a city, and those cities constitute the nodes of the graph), in order to evaluate the collaboration between east and west German geographers, the circulation of knowledge between East and West Germany and the structure of German geography after the reunification.
In this presentation, I will describe the process that leads from the analysis of the archives to the production of bipartite graphs with R. Then, I will compare the evolution of actor-event networks during the 1990s, analysing both historical evolution and inherent features of scientific conferences. Lastly, I will discuss the benefits and the limits (data, methodology) of these approaches.
Results.
On the one hand, congresses archives confirmed that East and West German congresses and geographical sciences were distinct and autonomous and cartography shows a clear separation by the “Iron Curtain” between them. On the other hand, East German surveillance archives proved that mediations existed between both sciences during the Cold War. Graph analysis of relations between geographers during congresses shows how East German geography is reconfigured in the 1990s. East cities become more central as congress places but west geographers are still more likely to participate to geographical congresses after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Conclusion.
Although the two Germanies were separated politically, links between geographers still existed in the late 1980s; which did not prevent a reconfiguration of both the locations and the networks of Eastern-German geography during the 1990s, to the detriment of the GDR scientific heritage. These results invite us to reread east European Cold War science with a less axiological perspective, and demonstrate the relevance of analysing scientific networks’ spatiality.