Making science of things: Objects and knowledge in, between, and beyond the sciences
Tamara Fernando, Brooke Penaloza-Patzak · 2026
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Description
Tamara Fernando and Brooke Penaloza-Patzak introduce a 2026 special issue on how physical things become scientific evidence. Objects and collections are among the most common forms of evidence, and they tend to last: research items move to storage, where they decay or age and pile up. That staying power gives old evidence endless afterlives in new questions and methods.
Making a thing work as evidence is messy work that borrows habits from many fields, not one discipline alone. Past debate has stayed narrow, centered on present day European and Euro-American ways of knowing. The issue's essays push past that frame, drawing on environmental, Indigenous, social, and labor history. They foreground how objects were actually used to back scientific projects, rather than the neat disciplines those projects later sorted into.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Tamara Fernando, Brooke Penaloza-Patzak |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 28 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |