How Uncertainty is Rendered Residual – Carsten Reinhardt

This event is part of our summer semester 2025 Lecture Series Expanding Science and Technology Studies.

Abstract:

Residual Uncertainty is a historiographical concept of mine that combines the contingency part of traditional historiography with an approach featuring chemical residues as “matter out of place, time, and reason”. In my lecture, I wish to further develop the concept through addressing social processes that enable uncertainty to become a permanent and powerful, yet invisible, as well as a flexible and scientific, but unquestionable, feature of society. In other words, I hope to answer the question: How is uncertainty rendered residual? I seek answers in the practices, concepts, and organizational forms of mid-twentieth-century regulatory science, embedded in the executive branch of government.

To take part either online or in presence, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.