2025-26 Colloquium Series

David Pedersen
Associate Professor

UC San Diego Anthropology Department 

Explanation/Meaning/Critique: Anthrohistory Confronts the Trumpist Take-Over

This paper draws on scholarship at the interdisciplinary crossroads of Anthropology and History to develop a modality of ‘reconstructive explanatory critique,’ which it brings to bear on the continuing Trumpist self-coup or autogolpe.  The paper introduces new research conducted in southern California, including interviews with recently freed participants in the January 6, 2021 take-over of the US Capitol Building.  The paper focuses on how events that day, along with aspects of their lead-up and aftermath, are congealing into key dramatic features of a durable and wide-spread popular narrative of the broader Trumpist take-over.  The paper argues that the compelling quality of this story is achieved in part through hiding the practical process of its congealing and the rule-like relations that shape this.   

David Pedersen is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UCSD and an instigator of his department’s affiliation with the Science Studies Program beginning in fall 2019. He currently is writing a book titled Capitol Crisis that moves from Washington, DC, to southern California, to El Salvador, to Silicon Valley, and back to contemporary DC in its combined historical and ethnographic study of the Trumpist takeover and struggles against it.  The book examines how both the unfinished auto-coup and some of its opposing forces are related to broader geohistorical transformations in capitalist relations, especially regarding money and political violence.

Stuart Geiger

Assistant Professor
UC San Diego Communication / HDSI

Program Members

This event is a follow-up to the meeting on November 3rd, in which we discussed Narayan and Shestakofsky's paper "Relationships that Matter." This meeting will continue that discussion, this time with the authors themselves. 

 

Assistant Curator for Special Projects

Huntington Library

What materials build the story of our complex relationship with science, technology, and medicine? At the Huntington library, readers hold this history in books, correspondence, illustrations, field notes, photographs, and more. How do curators begin to steward the countless narratives these objects tell? In this colloquium discussion, Natalie Lawler, assistant curator at The Huntington library, will share insight into the collaborative, creative, and challenging process of conceptualizing an exhibition and a related publication that highlights the library’s science collections from the 13th century to present day.

Professor Emeritx

UC San Diego History

Professor Emeritus, History Department

UC San Diego

It is well known that Freud regarded psychoanalysis as possessing the epistemic status of a science although his earliest work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), inevitably contains both causal and hermeneutic elements. However, it was not until 1957 that Karl Popper first publicly argued that psychoanalysis failed his own standard of scientificity--the standard of falsifiability--and therefore belonged in the same category as Marxism and astrology. At stake in this critique was the very therapeutic authority of psychoanalysis. Popper’s arguments soon encouraged other philosophers to join the fray, most notably at a New York University conference organized by Sidney Hook in 1958. Then, in 1965, three years after the appearance of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, psychoanalysis showed up as a topic in the debate about “normal science” between Popper and Thomas Kuhn at a conference organized by the Popperians at Bedford College, London and later published as Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970). At the time, no one yet knew that Kuhn himself had undergone psychoanalytic treatment between 1946 and 1948. But Kuhn’s Structure would later provide new resources for a few psychoanalysts to argue in support of the scientificity of analysis. Finally, in 1984, the philosopher of science Adolf Grünbaum argued against Popper that psychoanalysis was falsifiable by Popper’s own standards and, furthermore, that it had, indeed, been falsified. After Grünbaum, the debate appeared to lose steam—not least in the United States—not least because, in 1992, the American Psychoanalytic Association declared that the M.D. was no longer a requirement for membership. Indeed, from the late 1980s onward, psychoanalysis increasingly turned away from earlier preoccupations with scientificity and fully opened itself to intersubjective or hermeneutic approaches to the psyche. Although Popper’s reputation was already well-established before World War II based upon his earlier Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934) and The Poverty of Historicism (1936), there is no mention of psychoanalysis in either of those works.

In this talk, I shall present new evidence to explain his decision to incorporate it into his argument based upon the hitherto unknown influence of his little-known colleague at the London School of Economics, John Oulton Wisdom (1908-1993). At stake in these discussions was Popper’s own limited understanding of the actual practice of psychoanalysis.

March 9, 2026

Nithyanand Rao (graduation talk)
Graduate Student, Department of Communication 

 

Lab, Mine and Bungalow: Caste and Underground Physics at the Kolar Gold Fields

For three decades, from 1961 to 1992, Indian physicists worked in the deep underground mines of the Kolar Gold Fields (KGF). They used the low background-radiation environment in the mines, more than three kilometers deep, to study elusive subatomic phenomena. Curiously, the narratives around these experiments, articulated in terms that highlight the upper-caste scientists’ ingenuity, never mention the mines or the Dalit workers. Instead, these accounts emplace the scientists in the colonial-era bungalows where they lived during their time at KGF. How do we understand this place-making?

In this talk on a chapter from my dissertation, I examine the persona that stories of the experiments construct and argue that the scientists’ dissociation from labor in these stories must be seen in light of how caste orders spaces: the laboratory must be a place for the mind; it cannot be a place of bodily labor. This chapter forms a part of my dissertation in which I examine how the KGF experiments, which scientists hold as exemplifying an Indian science, relied on a separation of the Puruskrut and Bahiskrut Bharats—an “ideal, pure India” and an “actual, polluting India.”