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Greetings Israel Society for History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science, New items have been posted matching your subscriptions. Table of Contents H-PhysicalSciences: New posted content CFP (ONLINE SEMINAR / PUBLICATION OPPORTUNITY): Borders and Sustainability: Human and Natural Resources across Time and Space — Entangled Histories Seminar Series 2026–2027 [Announcement] H-Sci-Med-Tech: New posted content McCahey on Young, 'The Myth of the Natural Laboratory: Science, Empire, Their Derangements on Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands' [Review] H-PhysicalSciences: New posted content CFP (ONLINE SEMINAR / PUBLICATION OPPORTUNITY): Borders and Sustainability: Human and Natural Resources across Time and Space — Entangled Histories Seminar Series 2026–2027 [Announcement] Elisa Ramazzina Announcement Type Call for Papers Call for Papers: Entangled Histories Seminar Series 2026–2027  Theme: Borders and Sustainability: Human and Natural Resources across Time and Space The Entangled Histories Seminar Series invites abstracts for its 2026–2027 cycle, focusing on the History of the Physical Sciences (including physics; chemistry; earth, space, and atmospheric science; astronomy; and materials science). We seek contributions that examine the history of scientific knowledge through a diachronic perspective—from Prehistory and Antiquity, through the Middle Ages and the Early Modern era, to the Modern and Contemporary periods. This series explores sustainability as a relational and scientific process. We investigate how historical communities have negotiated ecological limits, managed vital resources, and facilitated the circulation of scientific knowledge across borders. We welcome proposals that analyse the physical sciences as an archive of human engagement with the material world. Core Research Domains for History of Physical Sciences: The Materiality of Scientific Resilience: The history of reuse, rewriting, and adaptation in scientific instruments and materials. We welcome studies on the repurposing of laboratory equipment, the structural history of material science, the recycling of chemical/physical components, and the archival role of scientific manuscripts (palimpsests). Elemental Theory and Environmental Imaginaries: The four classical elements (Earth, Water, Air, Fire) as the conceptual bedrock of early physical sciences. How have these frameworks informed cosmography, chemistry, and early earth sciences? How have environmental limits been theorised through scientific discovery throughout history? Circulation of Scientific Knowledge and Traditions: The "living memory" of technical and botanical wisdom. We focus on the movement of ideas, the history of measurement, and the exchange of maps and technical manuals across the physical sciences and cultural borders. Languages, Literatures, and Symbolic Landscapes: The role of heritage/minority languages and scientific nomenclature in preserving the memory of indigenous spatial perceptions and environmental heritage. How has the history of science interacted with literary representations of nature? Resilience, Folklore, and Local History: The use of ethnographic and local history records to document scientific adaptation to environmental or social shocks—such as climate changes, resource depletion, or technological shifts—through communal practice and local observation. Topics of Interest (Interdisciplinary Perspectives) Archaeology and Anthropology: Archeoastronomy, material culture of ancient sciences, and the record of long-term environmental adaptation in the physical sciences. Manuscript Studies, Philology, and Linguistics: The physical record of scientific memory, the evolution of terminology, and the preservation of ancient technical knowledge. History of Science, Medicine, and Technology: The material culture of scientific laboratories, botanical archives, and the history of natural resources as seen through the lens of physics and chemistry. Art History, Architecture, and Visual Culture: The "biography" of instruments, the history of scientific illustration, and the symbolic representation of borders and sustainability in scientific spaces. Geography, Cartography, and Media Studies: The mapping of physical spaces—how spatial representations in the physical sciences communicate environmental history across borders. Conceptual Framework Sustainability is framed here as a relational and memorial process. We explore how human groups have remembered their interactions with the environment and each other, using the Four Elements as a heuristic to bridge diverse historical strata within the physical sciences. Submission Guidelines & Selection Rules Format: Online seminar via Zoom (Approx. 30-minute presentation). Proposals must include: Title, Abstract (250–300 words), Bio (100–150 words), Affiliation, and Preferred months of availability. ⚠️ MANDATORY ABSTRACT CRITERIA: The abstract submitted MUST clearly explain how the proposed paper intends to address and integrate the central core topics of the series: Borders and Sustainability within a historical, medical, or anthropological framework. Proposals that fail to explicitly address this conceptual intersection will not be considered. ⚠️ CRITICAL SUBMISSION REQUIREMENT: All submission materials (title, abstract explaining the approach to borders and sustainability, bio, affiliation, and availability) MUST be compiled and submitted into a SINGLE file (.doc, .docx, or .pdf). Multiple attachments will not be considered. Please submit your single-file proposal to: entangledhistories.seminars [@] outlook.com Important Dates Deadline for abstracts: 31 August 2026 Notification of acceptance: By 30 September 2026 Publication Opportunity A selection of the most significant contributions will be published in a special issue or in a dedicated edited volume with a major, world-leading academic publisher. Contact Information Organised by: Dr Maria Pia Ester Cristaldi (Üsküdar University), Dr Elisa Ramazzina (University of Insubria) Under the patronage of: The Faculty of Communication and the Master’s Programme in Media and Cultural Studies at Üsküdar University.   Contact Email entangledhist...@outlook.com URL https://sites.google.com/view/entangledhistories/home Read more or reply Repost Back to top H-Sci-Med-Tech: New posted content McCahey on Young, 'The Myth of the Natural Laboratory: Science, Empire, Their Derangements on Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands' [Review] H-Net Reviews Young, Adrian. The Myth of the Natural Laboratory: Science, Empire, Their Derangements on Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands. : University of Hawaii Press, 2026. x + 233 pp. $70.00 (cloth), ISBN 9798880700721. Reviewed by Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University) Published on H-Sci-Med-Tech (August, 2026) Commissioned by Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse) Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=63000 The idea of certain places in the world, typically remote or island spaces, operating as “natural laboratories” is now a staple in the historiography of science. Studies of these places typically demonstrate that notions of geographical spaces functioning as laboratories are historically constructed, often rooted in imperial or other geopolitical frameworks.[1] Thus follows the narrative of Adrian Young’s The Myth of the Natural Laboratory: Science, Empire, Their Derangements on Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands, a fascinating study of the history of human sciences on the remote and storied Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands in the nineteenth through twentieth centuries. He focuses on “two contradictory and yet deeply interwoven myths”: that these islands served “as natural laboratories making visible fundamental truths” regarding race, language, and human behavior and that they were “places of heightened mystery or even ostensible duplicity, shielding their inscrutable truths from view” (p. 2). While much has been written about the residents of Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands, Young distinguishes his study from these by focusing not on the islanders nor on the diaspora but on researchers who came before him, who identified these places as uniquely appropriate for various studies in human science. These researchers often found themselves confronted by findings that did not mesh with their expectations of life on the island, leading to what Young identifies as “epistemic derangement” (p. 9). Regardless of their research field, he argues, “outsiders have long scrutinized Pitcairn Islanders for their own purposes, and ... these investigations were often bound up with colonial rule” (p. 161). While Young indeed focuses on the “studiers,” he is also clear that what outsiders learned about Pitcairn and Norfolk Islanders largely depended on how much the locals were willing to accommodate and share. This reliance was often the source of frustration for researchers who, after conceptualizing the islands as controlled environments, found their research subject to forces beyond their control, as the locals insistently made their voices heard. Young’s first chapter addresses the widespread early nineteenth-century conceptualization of Pitcairn Island as an idyllic Eden in the wake of its foundation in the aftermath of the famed Bounty mutiny, an event he covers briefly in the introduction. Romantic writers like Mary Russell Mitford perpetuated notions of Pitcairn as a lost paradise. Before long, this utopic idea had taken on a religious tinge, and many imagined the island as “a site of Christian redemption and moral righteousness” (p. 36). His second chapter examines the 1856 relocation of Pitcairn Islanders to the larger and more readily accessible Norfolk Island through colonial administrators’ conceptualization of this move as an experiment in establishing a model society. However, this model was deeply embedded in racial—and later eugenic—ideologies of the period, including both degeneration and “hybrid vigor” (p. 50). Drawing on the work of Ann Laura Stoler (Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, 1995), he demonstrates how administrators were preoccupied with anxieties over the sexual activities of the islanders, eventually concluding that the relocation was a “failed” experiment, as the islanders succumbed to indolence and moral laxity and as scientists were unable to either use the island to extract universal truths or even be sure of what they were observing. The remaining chapters follow a model whereby Young uses the work of a few scholars who made Pitcairn and Norfolk primary sites of study. In chapter 3, the author covers the work of American physical anthropologist Harry Shapiro, who saw the bodies of islanders, as well as their relatively comprehensively documented genealogies, as rich sources for studies of race and, later, populations. However, Shapiro soon began to doubt Pitcairn’s value as a genetic laboratory, believing that its promise oversold its social and biological realities, echoing Michael Fortun’s study of genomic science in Iceland (Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation, 2008). Chapter 4 examines the role of historians in shaping perceptions of Pitcairn and Norfolk. He notes that Rosalind Amelia Young, a Pitcairn Islander who used oral histories and material culture to document hitherto unstudied, often women-focused, stories from the island’s past, is typically regarded as an authentic indigenous voice, a primary source, rather than an academic authority, even as she generally argued that Pitcairn’s history was not exceptional. Henry Evans Maude, on the other hand, emerging from the tradition of scholar bureaucrats in the British Empire, became seen as a foundational figure in the burgeoning field of Pacific history, using new ethnohistorical techniques.[2] Maude insisted that the small populations and “recoverable” written and oral histories of Pacific islands made them into historical laboratories, small-scale sites of colonialism, migration, and exchange (p. 117). Young’s final chapter addresses linguistics, focusing on three researchers who “made Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands into linguistic laboratories” (p. 125). Albert Moverley, the first to write a book on the language of Pitcairn and Norfolk, had worked on Pitcairn between 1947 and 1951, before being forced to leave due to increasingly acrimonious relationships with locals as well as the Colonial Office. Elwyn Flint, on the other hand, was an expert in Pacific and pidgin languages and developed a technique of collaborating with locals, who recorded conversations without the presence of a researcher. Finally, Shirley Harrison, who spent her childhood on Norfolk Island before moving to Australia, produced a major study on “code switching” (p. 141). Initially beginning her study on the islands’ diasporic community in Australia, she also included local informants in the speech collection process, but like Rosalind Young before her, Harrison’s status as an indigenous islander and a woman meant that she was often treated as a source of data, rather than a scholar herself. A current running through this chapter considers debatable and unstable questions regarding what constituted things like language, pidgin or creole, and dialects. Another interesting theme of this chapter involves the materiality of linguistic studies, particularly that of magnetic tape and recording devices. Young concludes with an introspection on the place of his own work, which, it could be argued, is similar to the ones he studies. While he justifies his position with the claim that he does “not study the studied, but instead the studiers,” he wrestles with the uncomfortable knowledge that his own research is only possible because of colonial infrastructures and knowledge-gathering practices (p. 13). This is probably true of any historian of imperial science, but perhaps because of the historical “scale” Maude espoused, it feels truer in this case. Beyond texts on the history of laboratory metaphors and field science, this book joins the canon of several recent texts examining the history and anthropologies of the remnants of the British Empire, like the Falkland Islands, St. Helena, Tristan da Cunha, Antarctica, and more: settlements in remote and faraway places, often conceptualized as ideal settings for the extraction of scientific knowledge, just as notions of British technocratic expertise often provided justifications for sovereignty.[3] This engaging book will be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of anyone interested in how knowledge and power are mutually constituted, particularly in modern imperial settings. Finally, I could not help but be intrigued by Young’s tantalizing asides about geology, agronomy, and natural history on the islands: Were Pitcairn and Norfolk also conceived as laboratories in these fields? Perhaps, this will be a topic in his next book. Notes [1]. See, for example, Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2011); Antony Adler, “The Ship as Laboratory: Making Space for Field Science at Sea,” Journal of the History of Biology 47, no. 3 (2014): 333-62; Sebastian Grevsmühl, “Laboratory Metaphors in Antarctic History: From Nature to Space,” in Ice and Snow in the Cold War: Histories of Extreme Climatic Environments, ed. Julia Herzberg, Christian Kehrt, and Franziska Torma (Berghahn Books, 2019); and Jacalyn Duffin, Stanley’s Dream: The Medical Expedition to Easter Island (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). [2]. See W. David McIntyre, The Britannic Vision: Historians and the Making of the British Commonwealth of Nations, 1907-48 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). [3]. See, for example, Adrian Howkins, Frozen Empires: An Environmental History of the Antarctic Peninsula (Oxford University Press, 2017); Alison Bashford, “Empire in Oceania: Knowing the Sea of Islands,” in Islands and the British Empire in the Age of Sail, ed. Douglas Hamilton and John McAleer (Oxford University Press, 2021); Christopher L. Maternowski, “The ‘Guinea Pigs’ of Tristan Da Cunha and the Ethics of Medical Research in Britain and the Empire, 1961-1973,” Social History of Medicine 35, no. 2 (2022): 543-65; James J. A. Blair, Salvaging Empire: Sovereignty, Natural Resources, and Environmental Science in the South Atlantic (Cornell University Press, 2023); and Arthur MacGregor, St Helena: An Island Biography (Boydell Press, 2024). Citation: Daniella McCahey. Review of Young, Adrian. The Myth of the Natural Laboratory: Science, Empire, Their Derangements on Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands. H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews. August, 2026. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=63000 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Read more or reply Repost Back to top Message from a proud sponsor of H-Net: Apply for paid research fellowships in the humanities and social sciences at the John W. Kluge Center. Open to early career scholars. Deadline: September 15. Message from a proud sponsor of H-Net: The New Books Network is proud to be a sponsor of H-Net. If you are interested in becoming an NBN host, please go here. Si te interesa hacer entrevistas en español, contáctanos. Please help us keep H-Net free and accessible. $25 from each of our subscribers would fund H-Net for two years. Click here to make a tax-deductible donation online. Contact the Help Desk: he...@mail.h-net.org. Manage notification settings by visiting My Profile > Notifications on the Commons.