Tenth Belgian-Dutch PhD Conference in the History of Science, Medicine, and the Humanities
Eibergen, 8-10 April 2025
The PhD conference ‘Beyond Switching Plastic Straws’ was a success. There were 24 people: (a) 15 were women, (b) at least 5 were foreigners, (c) many talked about recovering the agency of historical actors, (d) several had car-shared, (e) all were involved in collective cooking and cleaning, (f) many were potential story-tellers, (g) 2 had cats in their presentations, (h) 8 had recurrently no time to ask their questions during the Q&As, and (i) more than 2 were historians of mathematics.
If the first Dutch-Belgium PhD conference on the history of science had a sense of “discipline formation”, as David Baneke –the first organizer of that 2007 edition– put it; the tenth edition confirms the solid roots of the history of science (and as always, ‘science’ understood in a broad sense) and also, the ambitions of its vibrant youth towards intellectual and material transformation of our community. Above all, this edition has been marked by discussions on the fate of science, Trump’s destruction and purge of the US academic institutions, its echoes and concrete threats in Europe, and on how our field, which has been long committed to understanding the political, social, and ethical dimensions of science and the scientific making of society, can now stand in effective and strategic solidarity among scientific workers – and workers generally– whose livelihoods are threatened by the authoritarian drift of global capitalism. In other words, there seemed to be a red thread throughout the three days – both during formal paper presentations and informal coffee talks – on how presentist concerns can only be achieved by a profound commitment to history.
Venue, format experimentation, pitches, and cutting vegetables
This year there was much experimentation with conference format. The venue – the Hotel De Greune Weide in the rural town of Eibergen – allowed for formal presentations and informal interactions and improvised intellectual discussions. As organizers, we wanted this conference to reflect our career stage and to take advantage of our capacity to experiment by proposing practical interventions to address selected political and social matters of our community. Moreover, we wanted to convey that at this conference we were not just presenting to each other but doing research as group work.
The conference programme accommodated our vision in multiple ways. Together with traditional paper presentations (see the programme summary below), we had 5-minute interventions called ‘Pitches and Moments’. No slides, but starting a conversation. The idea was for participants to have an extra moment to communicate a single engaging point in a short amount of time and stimulate discussion. As organizers, we could only hope that our invitation for a format-free contribution would be taken up. Some participants were skeptical at first, but we can safely say that it worked out incredibly well. All of those who presented a pitch brought us insights. They addressed a wide variety of topics, such as: (a) methodology, like problems and solutions with sources and tips on storytelling; (b) the situatedness of our research, like positionality, identifying as a researcher, and on how to deal with emotionally- and ethically-loaded research; and (c) several outreach adventures, like hybrid academic-theatrical performances and the publishing of popularizing books. These pitches helped to create a common and diversified discussion throughout the three days. This discussion continued during the breaks and in the evenings, as giving a more personal view of being a researcher and/or doing research elicited responses and helped others to open up with their stories. And there was quite a lot of laughter too!
This year, cooking and eating were parts of the programme. Groups were formed on a sign-up basis to carry out recurrent tasks: cutting, peeling, assembling, spicing, heating, stirring, table-setting, serving, collecting, soaping, scraping, scrubbing, rinsing, drying, placing. The tagline that kicked off this self-organising of reproductive labour was: “If you see something that needs care (human or non-human), care for it.” As historians of science, we know that scientific ideas have a material culture, so we wanted to bring this intellectual insight into the academic practice of conferences. Collective cooking was materially necessary for our talks and discussions to take place. As well, cooking together contributed to a sense of community and belonging. Not only because talking while cooking sparked a different type of discussion, but also because we were all involved in these tasks. This intervention became itself an object of discussion on the gendered nature of reproductive labour in academia and on the responsibilities that cis men should take, especially in a conference where most participants were women.
It was a deliberate choice to move the conference to a homey setting. As those participants working on issues of spatiality could maybe attest, we can say that the floor plan of the venue definitely contributed to the success of these experimental proposals. The industrial, well-equipped kitchen, eating area, coffee corner, and presentation area were situated in a single ground floor, with direct access to the outdoors and with lots of natural light. We arranged the furniture of the presentation area in a semicircle, which centred all the attention on the speaker, allowing discussion among the public, since eye-contact could be established virtually among all of us. Chairs and tables facilitated work with pen and paper and laptops, and comfortable couches were available too. Overall, the venue and how we chose to use the space offered ‘a sense of place’ that was fruitful and effective.
Programme summary
The programme started on Tuesday in the late afternoon. After some opening remarks by one of the organisers, Max Bautista-Perpinyà (UCLouvain), four participants kicked off the conference with several ‘Pitches’. We cooked and ate, and conversations went on into the night.
On Wednesday, the day began early with a session entitled How to write history of science that is not only about humans? Jess Chang (Department of Architecture at TU Delft) presented a joint paper ‘Isolation in Everyday Care: Isolation Rooms in 20th Century Dutch Cross Buildings,’ co-authored with Eileen van der Burgh (Leiden University), who unfortunately had to cancel her attendance. Jess told us about the fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration between herself – specialized in historical and contemporary research on nursing, digital technology and architecture – and Eileen, a nineteenth-century maritime historian. Their paper addressed the evolution of isolation rooms from the early to mid-20th century. First used as rooms where patients with infectious diseases could be physically isolated from the rest of the patients and doctors; in the post-war years (when infectious diseases like tuberculosis became less prevalent), ‘isolation rooms’ acquired multiple functions supporting the wide scope of healthcare services conducted by the local associations, like carrying out vision and hearing check-ups, ultraviolet radiations, or as bathrooms. Jess and Eileen’s paper brings the social history of local Cross Associations in the pillarized Dutch society; legal and medical history of the broader context of preventive public health practice; and floor plan analysis in order to uncover the uses and spatial sequence of users and patients in their visit to this local healthcare centres. Elian Schure (Utrecht University) followed with the paper ‘You are how you live: Human categorisation in contemporary microbiome research’ where she told us about her research on how gut researchers have used outdated concepts from cultural anthropology categorise humans according to diet, and specifically, on how blunt categories still rely on colonial classifications. Her research puts the focus on the ‘subsistence strategy’ theory, which classifies humans in three large groups: ‘Western’, ‘Agricultural’ and ‘Hunter-gatherer’. Elian argues that this research often relies on biased assumptions that romanticize and essentialise ‘traditional’ societies and pathologize ‘modernity’. Elian’s research has taken her to study how microbiome researchers studied the so-called ‘epidemiological transition’ in South Africa.
Jana De Kockere (Ghent University) reconstructed the reception of Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature, showing how reviewers Peter Pesic and Brian Vickers branded eco‑feminist history “non‑neutral” while openly pinning their hopes on technology to avert climate disaster. She argued that such neutrality talk operates as a “purification ideal,” patrolling the border of legitimate scholarship even though true apoliticism is impossible. By linking this rhetoric to Ghent’s recent campus protests — where neutrality was invoked to deflect calls for divestment — Jana exposed how the same gatekeeping mechanism still stabilises academic hierarchies today. Anna Derhaeg (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) uncovered a parallel dynamic in late‑nineteenth‑century Belgian delivery rooms: obstetricians promised chloroform on request yet routinely ignored explicit pleas, especially from working‑class women, while freely dosing those whose pain they themselves judged severe. Beyond highlighting this classed and gendered double standard, she revealed that doctors sometimes used anaesthesia to stifle “troublesome” behaviour or bypass consent for risky procedures. Taken together, the papers answer the session’s question by demonstrating that writing women back into science’s past requires dismantling the very claims to objectivity and paternal care that once erased them.
The session How to write history of science that is beyond the West? started with Bianca Angelien Aban Claveria (Leiden University). Bianca discussed how the vaccine Bacillus-Calmette-Guérin (BCG) was introduced in the American Colonial Philippines in the 20th century. Whereas American physicians were reluctant to accept the vaccine, Filipino physicians lobbied for a more active use. Bianca’s argument was grounded in parallels between the prevention of infectious disease and the Biblical Parable of the Sower, where the soil (our body) must be protected from the seeds (the pathogen). Overall, she carefully traced the shifting conceptions of what effective prophylaxis entailed. Then, Anna Bruins (University of Warwick and Utrecht University alumnus) took us to Mauritius, travelling along with the Dutch East India Company in the 17th and 18th century. Central to Anna’s argument was the concept of ‘bioprospecting’ or transforming natural knowledge and resources into something that can be sold. Dutch Mauritius is sometimes considered as a ‘failed’ enterprise, but the landscape was transformed forever by the animals introduced by the Dutch. In her research, Anna therefore creates space for these non-human travellers and travellees – and that includes not only the dodo, but also pigs, cows, rats, and greyhounds.
Jelmer Heeren (VU Amsterdam) presented his research on the life and work of Reijer Hooykaas of science in the form of a participatory quiz. Participants had to use their knowledge of our field to distinguish quotes from four historians of science: Hooykas and his compatriot Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis, Alexandre Koyré, and Thomas Kuhn. Of course, many of those quotes were meant to be ambiguous, but many (especially Dutch historians) did fairly well in telling the words of these four men apart. Congratulations to the quiz winners: Marieke, Luca, and Martijn!
Noor Vet, Sophie Bijleveld & Leonie Paauwe (Utrecht University) traced “futuring” across three Dutch geographical sub‑disciplines — Colonial Geography, Development Geography and Planology — showing how each circulated images of desirable tomorrows to legitimise present interventions and revealing how power imbalances shaped who could imagine which futures. Max Bautista‑Perpinyà (UCLouvain) then turned historiography into performance, animating three semi‑fictitious Spanish ecologists (a technocratic forester, a Catalan populariser and a Green‑Left parliamentarian) to probe how conflicting political ideologies, scientific tools and life trajectories converge into a single voice that “speaks for nature.” By inviting the audience to weigh archive against affect, Max demonstrated how creative narrative forms can surface compromises and erasures conventional prose leaves hidden. Together the presenters insisted that every storytelling device — map, scenario or monologue — actively shapes both the futures we pursue and the pasts we preserve.
Rinske Vermeij (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) continued the talk she gave at the last edition of this conference, two years ago. Today, she presented the Heymans Cube in action, discussing how his theory entered the educational field in the early 20th century. Teachers helped to refine Heymans’ theory, since they were enlisted to contribute through questionnaires, helped with the interpretation of results and then engaged in discussions at the first pedagogical congress of the Netherlands in 1913. The ‘objective’ intentions of Heymans were not always accepted, and Rinske showed how these clashed with the political nature of scientific knowledge. Also Elske de Waal (Utrecht University) spoke of teachers and politics, but then in the context of Realistic Mathematics Education (RME). She argued that RME was shaped by a social-democratic ideal: in content (the idea that democratic mathematics should be useful for a future citizen) but also in its circulation (RME was intended to be adapted by schools to their local needs). As a consequence, RME should not be seen as a single entity with a single origin, but rather as a diffuse system where pressing questions of knowledge ownership and circulation arise. Elske’s point was clear: also mathematics education is political.
Luca Forgiarini (Utrecht University) followed CERN through the 1960s as it confronted uneven national resources by standardising experimental protocols and channelling disparate budgets into a coordinated European agenda — a process he dubbed “CERNtralisation.” He showed that this strategy not only unified high‑energy physics but also recast Geneva as a diplomatic arena where scientific priorities doubled as integration policy. David Skogerboe (Utrecht University) charted a comparable shift at ESRO, where meteorologists repackaged weather research as a practical service to justify Europe’s first meteorological satellites, thus blurring the line between “scientific” and “application” payloads. By dissecting council minutes and technical briefs, he revealed that the real debate centred on who would control satellite data and derive socio‑economic benefits. Both talks answered the session’s challenge by showing that escaping Earth’s gravity never frees us from earthly politics: whether protons or cloud tops, data flow through networks of sovereignty and prestige.
The next day, Florian van der Zee (Erasmus University Rotterdam) traced Jan Spaander’s 1956 plea to outlaw trade in “therapeutic substances of human origin” back to the local moral infrastructure that formed around Rotterdam’s Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service in 1930. Using the concept of a “valuation constellation,” he showed how pumps, ledgers and donor cards did more than move blood: they anchored a moral infrastructure that cast blood as a civic gift and, by 1960, had enrolled breast‑milk and corneas as blood’s “moral twins.” This expanding alignment repositioned the whole body as a single moral object and furnished the vocabulary of voluntary, non‑remunerated donation. Caroline Schep (Leiden University) flipped the colonial lens to late‑colonial Indonesia, documenting patients who brewed herbal teas, popped aspirin and tried patent pills before consulting Dutch doctors, and exposing physicians’ complaints about “American‑sounding” self‑doctoring as anxiety over a porous pharmaceutical marketplace. Her source work with ads, memoirs and clinic notes revealed that therapeutic choices hinged on class, location and ethnicity yet sometimes bridged those divides. Together, the papers answered the session’s provocation by showing that medical order is built and contested through material and moral infrastructures — blood banks, drug ads and everyday refusals — rather than bestowed from above.
Martijn van der Meer (Erasmus University Rotterdam) continued with ‘Bound by Proximity: Polio Vaccination Refusal and the Discovery of the Dutch Bible Belt’ where he described vaccination refusal as “a collective expression of solidarity,” a way to protect local communities, bound both by geographical proximity and a strong interpretation of Biblical passages. Martijn’s talk blended medical history and anthropology, to offer a ‘flattening’ description of the relationship between rural religious communities and the modernising state, highlighting how the former are not simply ‘ignorant’ of scientific and medical facts, or ‘untrusting’ of state interventions; but rather, how the very act of collective refusal has a positive connotation: the making of a local community. Lisa Vanderheyden (Utrecht University) finished the double medical history session with her talk ‘Refusal, Negotiation and Permission: Parental Attitudes Towards Fetal Conservation and Dissection in Early twentieth Century Amsterdam’. Her work mobilizes archival sources to recover the experience of fathers and mothers during pregnancy and stillbirth in Amsterdam at the turn of the century. In this paper, she made a strong historiographical point. Contrary to the notion that foetuses and children’s bodies where “socially invisible outside the anatomists’ laboratories,” she brought forward evidence that parents in the early twentieth century often contested, refused, and negotiated with medical doctors the fate of the bodies and foetuses of their children.
Wen Shichao (UCLouvain) reframed the classic Mendelism–biometry clash as a dispute over reading the normal distribution: Galton’s faceted stone upheld stable “types,” while Pearson’s quincunx dissolved typology into endless variance, allowing biometricians to portray variation itself as lawful. This statistical realignment, he argued, underpinned the dismissal of “type” as unscientific and set the stage for population genetics. Marieke Gelderblom (Utrecht University) showed how Dutch demographers’ embrace of the “graphic method” (1870‑1890) transformed raw numbers into bar charts and shaded maps that made literacy, marriage and prostitution legible at a glance; government skepticism faded as standardised templates migrated from state reports to classroom walls. Her close reading of visual conventions demonstrated that graphics not only displayed facts but actively re‑configured investigative agendas. Together, Wen and Marieke answered the session’s meta‑question by revealing that epistemology is inseparable from its visual and statistical media: change the diagram — be it curve or chart — to remake the very grounds of knowing.
In the next session, we heard two thematically different talks yet united by discussions on the methodology and epistemology of science. Xavier Salet (Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences) kicked it off with his talk ‘The role of (post-)positivism in the field of qualitative social scientific research methodology’, where he traced the historical trajectory of the notion of ‘positivism’ and ‘post-positivism’ in the social sciences. He tracked the plastic meanings of those terms in qualitative social research publicaitons published between 2017 and 2022, using a systematic analysis. Xavier combined this literature analysis with historical work, tracing the roots of contemporary discussions the anti-establishment movements of the late 1960s. In the 1960s as today, uses of terms like ‘positivism’ and ‘post-positivism’, as well as ‘interpretivism’ and ‘constructivism’ were often used to engage in boundary work, defending as well as attacking certain qualitative approaches and underlying epistemological proposals in a moment of consolidation of what today are benchmark quantitative methods. Charline Marbaix (Université de Mons) continued these philosophical discussions with her work ‘Strong Objectivity and Evidence-Based Medicine. Towards “Strong Evidence” in Medical Research’. A practicing medical doctor, Charline brings feminist theory to investigate the epistemology of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM). In her talk, she discussed the ‘reformist’ feminist approach to EBM, where the historical androcentrism of medicine is corrected by including under-represented groups, like women and racialised people – thus improving the empirical foundations of meta-analysis. “Reform is necessary,” Charline reminds us, “but is it enough?” Even if women are included in new medical studies, a gender lens is often superficial or lacking, and thus she looks at more profound propositions, like those of Patricia Hill Collins, Donna Haraway, and Sandra Harding. Charline’s proposes the concept of “strong evidence” as a wait to analyse existing medical research afresh and at the same time, set new research agendas for a truly transformative medical practice.
In the final session of the conference, Ties van Gemert (Tilburg University) discussed the interconnections between the mathematical, philosophical and socialist ideas of Gerrit Mannoury (1867-1956). Like Dirk Jan Struik, Jan Burger, and Jan Tinbergen, also Mannoury fit into the Dutch tradition of combining socialism and mathematics. In a visually engaging presentation, Ties pointed towards the unity in Mannoury’s thinking and argued that it forms a paradigmatic case for reflecting on the historicity of political conceptions of mathematics.
Concluding remarks
Overall, the tenth edition of the Belgian-Dutch PhD Conference in the History of Science, Medicine, and the Humanities brought three days of intensive intellectual and communal exchange. Traditional papers were complemented by experimental ‘Pitches and Moments’, and collective cooking deepened the sense of shared labour and scholarly solidarity. Themes ranged from colonial science, reproductive medicine, and microbiomes to spatiality and socialist mathematics, with a strong focus on positionality, gender, and authority. The atmosphere was open, critical, and generative – fostering storytelling, debate, and laughter. Whether discussing rats in Mauritius or epistemologies of evidence, participants engaged in history with urgency and care.
The conference exemplified how early-career historians are reshaping the field. Not only through the topics they choose, but through how they choose to work. Intertwining theory and practice, past and present, the programme foregrounded critical historiography and a politics of care. Present-day concerns – academic precarity, ecological breakdown, authoritarianism – were not bracketed but placed centre stage. The mood was collaborative, experimental, and boldly reflexive.
In that regard, ‘Beyond Switching Plastic Straws’ was not just a slogan, but a provocation: how can our research and our scholarly practices reflect the systemic changes we hope to see? This conference suggested that we begin by treating care, critique, and collectivity not as accessories, but as central methodologies. As participants peeled potatoes and unpacked epistemologies side by side, they modelled a vision of academia that is at once generous, political, and intellectually sharp. May the next ten editions continue to push these boundaries.
We want to express our gratitude to the organisations sponsoring the conference. We were able to significantly reduce the participant’s fees which allowed several unfunded PhD students to participate, while at the same time expanding the number of participants. It is good to see that the number of PhDs working on the history of science in the Low Countries is growing! We therefore want to extend a heartfelt thank you to our donors: Gewina, the Belgian-Dutch Society for History of Science and Universities; the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities at Utrecht University; the Center for Philosophy of Science and Society (CEFISES) at the Université catholique de Louvain; the Huizinga Institute, the Dutch National Research School for Cultural History; the National Committee for Logics, History and Philosphy of Science of the Royal Academies for Sciences and Arts Of Belgium; the École doctorale en philosophie (ED1) of the Fonds national de la recherche scientifique (F.R.S.-FNRS); and the Vossius Center for the History of Humanities and Sciences at the University of Amsterdam.
Yours sincerely,
The organizing committee,
Marieke Gelderblom (Utrecht University), m.h.gelderblom@uu.nl;
Max Bautista-Perpinyà (UCLouvain), max.bautista@uclouvain.be;
Martijn van der Meer (Erasmus University Rotterdam), vandermeer@eshcc.eur.nl.
