VirtHSTM logo cross-stitch by Jemma Houghton. All photos provided by the authors.
As most Contingent readers know by now, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced lockdowns around the world, the academic world faced the issue of how to maintain community ties in the face of working from home and all that entailed. Teaching went online. Conferences were postponed or canceled. Libraries and archives were shuttered, leaving books stranded in inaccessible shelves or offices which could no longer be entered. Even the television programs habitually consumed by academics as procrastination and stress relief went into hiatus just as they were most needed. It would be months before the culture of online conferences would emerge and start to resurrect the social spheres of academia—with one exception.
In March 2020, Sarah Qidwai was a PhD candidate in the history of science at the University of Toronto whose work focused on a Muslim polymath and science popularizer in British India. At the onset of the pandemic, on March 20, 2020, she took a proactive approach to the academic atomization of social distancing, and tweeted that she was “thinking about starting up some virtual #histSTM groups/workshops/discussions/grad communities via Skype. Are folks interested?!”1
The answer, it turned out, was an overwhelming yes. Based on the enthusiastic responses she received, Sarah reached out to a number of friends in the field of the history of science who had responded in the affirmative. What made these people unique were that they were all friendships which had been formed online—a social formation which, after decades of existence, was about to lose its second-tier status to “friends in real life.”
Sarah Qidwai’s tweet which launched the project.
The four friends to whom Sarah reached out were a mix of backgrounds and career stages. Megan Baumhammer was a PhD candidate at Princeton, writing her dissertation on early modern science and the teaching of natural history at the University of Padua. Kelcey Gibbons was an undergraduate senior at the University of Pennsylvania, now a PhD student at MIT working on the history of African-American computing communities. Eddie Guimont was an adjunct professor at the University of Connecticut-Stamford whose research is on pseudoscience and pseudohistory in colonial contexts, and now is an assistant professor of world history at Bristol Community College.2 Finally, Daniella McCahey had been a lecturer at the University of Idaho, and is now assistant professor of modern British history at Texas Tech University; her research connects Antarctic science to modern world history. In April 2020, the five of us became the steering committee of the Virtual History of Science Technology and Medicine group, or VirtHSTM. Even today, most of these friends and colleagues have never met face-to-face.3
The VirtHSTM board in action.
Since April 2020, VirtHSTM has organized a regular series of events for the wider history of science community, deciding to set our programming based on the needs of our members. Our model is to work with a collaborator or two on a specific theme—whether it is an academic talk discussing global race and technology or the history of science and disability; conversations on topics like alt-ac employment and how to pursue publication; even book launches for works we think will be must-reads for our members.4 Throughout summer 2020, we held a weekly reading discussion group related to that week’s theme. We also held social events, ranging from informal check-ins to a “Scary Stories from the History of Science” event for Halloween.5
The organization depends on the generosity of scholars from across the board, and when organizing talks we have kept in mind the need for participants to reflect the diversity of the field, as well as the range of employment. Among the mix of graduate students, tenured professors, and alternatively-employed academics who have taken part in our events are Erin Bartram, Allison Horrocks, Mariam Sabri, Helen Rozwadowski, Michael F. Robinson, Pablo Gomez, Jemma Houghton, Suman Seth, and Erika Milam. Our events have been arranged for a wide variety of time zones, including events specifically held for members in Europe, Australia, and Asia and typically draw anywhere from ten to sixty people.
From VirtHSTM’s alt-ac session. Contingent editor Erin Bartram (top row, left) spoke at the session.
We view VirtHSTM and our philosophy of running it to be a significant intervention into the field. Building a community and its infrastructure from the ground-up and taking into account an online approach from the start rather than trying to adapt an in-person model have helped us sidestep some of the hurdles that existing history of science organizations faced when trying to adopt primarily in-person models—and website infrastructure—to the new pandemic realities.
From the start of our organization, we have been committed not only to building and maintaining a new community at a time of academic atomization and precarity, but also to take the opportunity of building a community at a time of crisis to intervene in the field, ensuring we did not perpetuate issues around representation, diversity, hierarchy, and insularity that have become increasingly obvious in recent years. An example of this was that from our inception we decided it was important to think about access and accessibility. While not perfect, and with virtually no budget, we have tried our best and consulted with experts such as Jaipreet Virdi, a historian of disability, about providing transcripts for our events, and early on adopted the use of Otter.ai for our Zoom discussions.6
At the same time, VirtHSTM’s focus on organizing primarily through social media—allowing for promotion via existing academic networks, as well as informal social connections—has facilitated for the rapid creation, and more importantly the continuance, of a network of individuals who would not have been able to be organized beforehand, not only due to geographic separation but division of specialization, including regulars who have no academic affiliation at all and have therefore not been served by the typical scholarly networks of communication. Due to our commitment, within months our efforts led to the VirtHSTM steering committee being asked by the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS) to help organize their newly-online annual conference, the 2020 Global Digital History of Science Festival. The success of the event led to the VirtHSTM steering committee members co-authoring an article on online conference organization with members of the BSHS council, as well as collaborating again on their 2021 online conference—which included a VirtHSTM panel.7 We have also organized a crossover panel with the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine’s Ocean Science, Technology and Medicine group. The group has also received backing from the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology thanks to the support of its director, Edward Jones-Imhotep. More recently, two long-term VirtHSTM members, Rebecca Martin and Alok Srivastava, have begun working on establishing a History of the Body subgroup under our heading, demonstrating the flexibility and range of the VirtHSTM organization.
Poster for the VirtHSTM book launch event of Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life by Matthias Determann.
VirtHSTM has not only survived but grown after a year and a half of existence. As of March 2022, the mailing list has over 500 subscribers and continues to develop new connections with the wider history of science community. In this, VirtHSTM demonstrates that it is possible to develop a new type of organization which does not fit into the existing models in academia. VirtHSTM is not a professional group, conference, or discussion group—but delivers on elements of all of them, while helping to shape the discourse in the wider field. Moving into the future, we will continue to provide a space for everyone interested in the history of science, technology, and medicine at all career stages to network, to learn professionalization skills, and to engage in the latest research. Even beyond the (ever-hopeful) end of the pandemic, both the actual network, and more broadly the model of organizing established by VirtHSTM, will lead to a flowering of activity in the history of science field, by a larger and more diverse group of scholars than participated before 2020—a social network born of social distancing.
- Sarah Qidwai, post, Twitter, March 20, 2020, accessed January 29, 2022, https://twitter.com/skidwayy/status/1241121738215305219.
- To learn more about Eddie’s work, a good place to start is his feature for Contingent Magazine, “Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa.”
- The Virtual HistSTM Community, 2020, accessed January 29, 2022.
- “Alt-ac,” shorthand for “alternative-academic careers,” broadly refers to those who after achieving a humanities degree in higher education search for jobs outside of traditional teaching faculty positions. Lauren Apter Bairnsfather, Pam Lach, Jason Myers, and Anne Mitchell Whisnant, “In Admin: Four History PhDs Discuss their Alt-Ac Careers,” Perspectives on History, November 1, 2013, accessed January 29, 2022.
- Sarah Qidwai, post, Twitter, October 28, 2020, accessed January 29, 2022, https://twitter.com/skidwayy/status/1321568872793853953
- Otter.ai provides real-time transcription and note-taking services.
- Sam Robinson, Megan Baumhammer, Lea Beiermann, Daniel Belteki, Amy C. Chambers, Kelcey Gibbons, Edward Guimont, Kathryn Heffner, Emma-Louise Hill, Jemma Houghton, Daniella McCahey, Sarah Qidwai, Charlotte Sleigh, Nicola Sugden, and James Sumner, “Innovation in a crisis: Rethinking conferences and scholarship in a pandemic and climate emergency,” The British Journal for the History of Science 53, no. 4 (December 2020): 575-90.
