Call for papers

This list is obviously incomplete. It is intended simply to be indicative.

The impact of developments in physical communications infrastructures (railways, international postal system) on the flow of information ideas, people and publications. The gradual extension of the physical communications infrastructure of railway networks, the emergence of the international postal system, for example, with two and three mail deliveries a day in the major cities, gradually speeded up the flow of information, ideas, publications and people throughout Europe and helped create new kinds of social networks and organizational development nationally and internationally.

Emergence and Impact of Science, the development of “communities of scientific practice,” the formation of an epistemic culture embracing new social and human sciences. An international epistemic culture developed in the sciences creating cognitive boundaries and encouraging the formation of special “communities of practice” by means of which what constituted science and who might be considered to be scientists came to be accepted. This culture influenced the development of the social and human sciences. It required the development of communicative practices involving the formation of educational and research institutions and the creation of scientific societies and associations The laboratories, the national and international meetings and the systems of substantive and bibliographic publication. associated with these developments helped create an international arena for the movement of scientists and the exchange of ideas.

The international traffic of ideas and persons in the development of major progressive social and political movements such as socialism, liberalism, and feminism; the linking of individuals, various forms of organization at local through international levels. The growth of such major social and political movements of the time as socialism, various other forms of political progressivism and feminism was characterized by an extraordinary international traffic in ideas and persons. This linked influential individuals and animated the meetings and other activities of local, national and international associations concerned with political change and various cultural and scientific developments.

Worlds Fairs as new kinds of spaces for knowledge organization and display. The World’s fairs created new kind of space for assembling and exemplifying commercial, national, and scholarly interests on a global scale. It was an apparently neutral international space for display that brought together products, technologies, organizers, exhibitors, and spectators from around the world. This space was also occupied by a panoply of scholarly and professional meetings. This is the context for profound influences on ideas about classifying or ordering knowledge and about creating supranational organizations that became such an important part of the thinking of scholars such as Paul Otlet and Patrick Geddes.

International associations and organizations as modalities for exchanging information
and the mechanism for what could be described as “international life.” International associations and organizations with their meetings, publications and networks of communicating individuals increasingly represented almost every kind of scientific, social and political interest. They created new modalities for the exchange of information and linked local and national interests internationally into something that could be described as “international life”.

Emergence of various kinds of local conduits, such as public libraries, social museums, Maisons du Peuple, local groups, societies and publications, for bringing more widely circulating ideas and influences into particular communities.

The ideas, work and, over the course of their lifetimes, the ever ramifying personal and organizational networks associated with the founders of the Mundaneum, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine. The two colleagues worked together for over fifty years as they created the International Office and Institute of Bibliography (1895), the Central Office and Union of international Associations (1907 and 1910), the International Museum (1910) and the Palais Mondial and Mundaneum (1920). Their work in these contexts and outside them brought them into contact with almost every major figure and institutional development in intellectual life in Belgium and internationally during the period before the First World War. La Fontaine was awarded the 1913 Nobel Peace prize for his work in for international arbitration and the peace movement more generally . Their varied, perhaps emblematic experience can be compared to the other initiatives of the time that with the help of vast networks of individuals and institutions were striving towards realizing a world wide culture of peace.