Whether it is build to last or temporary, each new structure dedicated to showing science crystallizes a specific configuration of science in society and usually involves scientists, administrations, popularizers, museum and exhibition professionals and the publics it addresses. Science displays thus both reflect and contribute to shape the relations between the groups of actors involved. The conference focusses on the articulation between science, science policy and science popularization.

We study the objects, concrete displays, architectures for showing science, and consider these as materializations, at particular points in time, of specific conceptions of science and its social, cultural, economic or political place in society. Because a number of evolutions or public decisions now take place at European or international levels, it is important to consider these questions in a transnational perspective. How have the sciences been integrated in existing traditions of popularisation and heritage administration within national contexts that long conceived and handled »patrimoine«, »Kulturerbe«, »heritage«, or »patrimonio« in radically different ways? By adopting a deliberately wide chronological focus, from the 1800s to now, the conference seeks to contribute to contemporary debates by helping put into historical perspective the rapid transformation that institutions devoted to research, higher education and science communication are all currently undergoing. It looks into the recent and widespread surge in interest on the part of scientific communities for their historical remains, as testified by the establishment of a number of national and international organizations devoted to the preservation, promotion and exhibition of, e.g., university collections. Should the concomitant proliferation of exhibitions and museological work within universities and the upheavals in institutional landscape of science not be seen as a manifest expression of the very issues under study here? This interdiciplinary conference brings together exhibition makers and specialists from the history of collections and museums, historians of science and design, historians of culture, specialists of contemporary and past public research policy and science popularization.

International conference organized by Andrée Bergeron (Universcience/Centre Alexandre-Koyré), Charlotte Bigg (CNRS/Centre Alexandre-Koyré), Jochen Hennig (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin), Lisa Regazzoni (Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main).

Conference programme Les mises en scène des sciences et leurs enjeux, 19e-21e siècles, Paris 2015