The Role of Academies in the Co-Evolution of Science and the State

What is the relationship between scientific knowledge and state power? How have academies of sciences shaped – and been shaped by – political authority, governance, and societal expectations? How have these institutions mediated between science and the scientists, on the one hand, and the state, on the other? These questions lie at the heart of the workshop The Role of Academies in the Co-Evolution of Science and the State, organized by the European Academies Research Initiative (EARI). While individual European academies have been studied extensively, a genuinely international and comparative perspective remains underdeveloped. EARI addresses this gap by making academies themselves the object of historical and systematic inquiry.

The workshop focuses on the development of modern sciences and the emergence of modern state institutions as mutually constitutive historical processes. Academies often operated at the boundary between autonomy and authority – between independent knowledge production and official state functions – and can thus be understood as boundary organizations mediating science, governance, and society.

We invite paper proposals that engage with these themes from historical, comparative, and interdisciplinary perspectives. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• Academies as boundary organizations between science and the state
• Academies and empire: roles before, during, and after colonial rule
• Academies in Europe before, during, and after the Cold War
• Comparative studies of academies across political systems and regimes
• Transnational networks, international cooperation, and scientific diplomacyNon-European perspectives and global entanglements of academies

Although EARI is a European network, contributions addressing non-European cases or global comparisons are explicitly encouraged.