Networks of knowledge and power: working collaboratively on the HoNESt project

Abstract

Working collaboratively across national and disciplinary boundaries poses both challenges and opportunities for historians. The results of international collaborative research projects are directly shaped by their structure and the people working on them, from opening up new avenues of enquiry, to talking at cross-purposes with colleagues from different disciplines. Writing in English Historical Review, Ludmilla Jordanova introduces the concept that history and social science pursue similar questions, but do so with different ‘habits of mind’. Jordanova proposes that it is the differences between these ‘habits of mind’ which can cause confusion and misunderstanding between scholars. In this article I will outline how these different habits have come to the fore in the History of Nuclear Energy and Society (HoNESt) project, and how the project has been planned to account for them. Such differences in ‘habits of mind’ whilst working collaboratively, transnationally and inter-disciplinarily, have shaped the research pursued, prompted us to ask new questions and provided surprising and unexpected results.

Keywords

• Nuclear power
• nuclear history
• interdisciplinary research
• social movements
• protest
• British history
• European history