ABSTRACT
The term ‘circulation’, prevalent in various medical, economic and technical fields for a long time, has arrived rather recently in the domain of sociology of science and knowledge and in science history. Used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by physiologists and alchemists when referring to the circulation of blood and matter, and by hygienists of the eighteenth century when talking about circulation of air, the term entered the field of the social in liberal economics as well as in Marx’s theory referring to the circulation of capital. In their analysis of industrial modernity, the social sciences broadened the use of the circulation concept, soon referring not only to capital but likewise to raw material, humans and ideas (Sarasin and Kilcher 2011: 7). From the 1990s onwards, the social sciences have multiplied usages of the term of circulation – circulation of data, signs and symbols, of practices, images and discourses – to the point that circulation ‘has become a diffuse catch-word for all sorts of processualities and transfers at different levels’ (Sarasin and Kilcher 2011: 8). It also ‘forms a recurrent, though non-theorized, concept in the history of science’ (Raj 2006: 225-6). The present volume provides efforts at conceptualization, empirical studies of international circulation of knowledge within the social sciences, and it asks what kind of social science knowledge is produced in circulation. The purpose of this introduction is to position this volume within recent and ongoing debates in the concerned fields of scholarly activity.1
