Conference - Interprofessional and Interdisciplinary Relations in Russia: Zones of Collaboration, Competition and Conflict

Conference venue: Durham, UK
Period: September 19-20, 2014

International conference, taking place in Durham on 19-21 September 2014 at the Institute of Advanced Study. Sponsors include Durham University's Faculty of Arts & Humanities and its School of Modern Languages and Cultures, as well as the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES).

Professions and sciences form a complex, highly differentiated yet closely interconnected, field of expert knowledge and labour, vital to all modern states and societies. The focus of this conference will be on the dynamics of this field in Russian history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The conference will re-examine the history of Russian professions and sciences from a new vantage point – that of interprofessional and interdisciplinary relations. This is a neglected aspect of this history, yet vital to understanding how Russian professions and sciences created, defined and legitimised their work, expertise and jurisdictions.

The role of professional and scientific communities in Russian history has been documented in some detail, especially in the context of the tentative emergence of a ‘civil society’ in the late tsarist period and the rise of modern state practices in the early twentieth century. Extant historiography has, however, focused primarily on the dialectics between professionalization/disciplinary formation and changing state politics. Emphasis has been placed mostly on questions of state-dependent corporate institutionalization, the problematic nature of professional autonomy, and the politicization of professional/scientific communities and their work. This research has tended to analyse individual professional/disciplinary groups independently of each other or else to fuse them into fluid categories, such as ‘the intelligentsia’, ‘the middle classes’, ‘the academic elites’ or ‘science’ as such. Absent from this has been a closer examination of the way different professional and scientific groups mutually interacted in contexts other than the socio-political.

This conference will, by contrast, consider the following:

The shift of perspective entailed here also prompts a shift in focus: the empirical case studies that the conference will be examining will not be unitary professions/disciplines (in their socio-political and cultural environments), but more broadly imagined and less clearly determined zones of multiprofessional and multidisciplinary encounter – areas where different groups’ respective jurisdictional interests brought them into contact, prompting collaboration, competition and conflict.

Many of the disciplinary and professional groups whose interrelations we intend to investigate will be in the making or in transformation, rather than fully formed and determined – something typical of zones of boundary interaction. Thus, terms such as ‘profession’, ‘science’ or ‘discipline’ are, by strategic choice, conceptualized more loosely in order to include groups that might only be aspiring to these statuses (‘mere’ occupations or emergent scientific/intellectual movements).

The recent historiography of Russian professions, sciences and the intelligentsia has already brought to the fore and explored some key examples of such multiprofessional zones. These, as a rule, cluster around matters of ‘life and death’ – biological, social or national survival or reproduction; especially those targeting issues relating to the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics: sex, gender, suicide, deviance, eugenics, child development. It is precisely these zones that have been claimed (simultaneously) by the most socially expansionist of modern professions and sciences (medicine, law, the various human and social sciences). However, even when these extant historiographies note the importance of interdisciplinary and interprofessional engagements, they rarely subject them to a sustained and focused analysis.

Our conference will do precisely that – both in relation to arenas of interprofessional and interdisciplinary interaction that have, to some extent, been charted (e.g. the ‘biopolitic’ examples cited above) and those that have not received much attention in this context, yet clearly lend themselves to this kind of analysis, such as the history of Russian ‘local studies’ (kraevedenie) – a multidisciplinary field that brings together local historians, geographers, ecologists, and numerous other stakeholders. Other examples that we will examine include climate change, map-making, patent law, invalidity, etc.

The conference will look at a broad spectrum of professional and scientific fields in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The approach we adopt will lend itself to re-examining points of (dis)continuity across the tsarist and Soviet eras. The focus on interprofessional and interdisciplinary relations does not bracket out the role that the state might have played in these dynamics, both by providing an overarching context of power relations in Russian/Soviet society and as a major stakeholder in its own right. This entails an explicit acknowledgment and inclusion of the significance of the different political contexts that Russian professionals and scientists were operating in over the time period we will explore.

The conference will also draw on a range of sociological approaches to the problem of professions and sciences with which Russianist historiography has thus far not engaged directly – namely, studies that have foregrounded the dynamics of interprofessional and interdisciplinary relations as crucial to understanding the formation of professional and scientific identities and the structuring of professional or scientific work. Here we include Andrew Abbott’s System of Professions (1989), as well as studies of ‘boundary work’, ‘boundary objects’ and ‘trading zones’ in the history of science (e.g. the work of Thomas Gieryn, Susan Lee Star, and Peter Galison respectively), all of which in different ways problematize complex boundary engagements between professional or scientific groups (e.g. the building of consensus, the negotiation of collaboration, the trading off of conceptual and material resources, etc.). Other relevant sources and theoretical frameworks will also be explored, such as work on ‘scientific/intellectual movements’ (Frickel & Gross 2004) – an approach to questions of innovation and change in the history of professional and disciplinary formation, which seeks inspiration in the sociology of social movements.

Andy Byford
e-mail: andy.byford@durham.ac.uk