The essays in this special issue examine possibilities and challenges that methodologies, language and sources coming from Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, South Asia and the Middle East offer to histories of science and technology. They are intended to be short ‘think pieces’ that provocatively propose alternative terms, temporalities and spatialities. These essays put into question existing paradigms of association among ‘Western’ and non-Western historical actors, staid ideas about development, and the usefulness of Euro-American categories and models to examine histories of science both within and outside an ill-defined and totalizing west. The majority of these pieces were selected from a larger group of pre-circulated draft papers presented at a workshop ‘Remapping and (Dis)Locating Global Histories of Science and Medicine’ held at Harvard University in April 2017. The essays here span a chronology of more than five centuries, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first, and depart from localized case studies. We specifically asked contributors to creatively engage with new languages and methodologies that illustrate how to produce new meanings for old histories. Most of the authors in this special issue hail from the spaces of which they write and yet none reside there. This matters because the locality and, it has to be repeated, inevitable provinciality of Euro-American discussions about the so-called global profoundly shapes the types of questions and methodologies we produce – especially from where our analytical lens originates and to where it points. Moreover, our place of residency can – and does – determine if what we produce sparks a dialogue with our peers or sinks into a disinterested void. Our hope is that this issue sparks further dialogue about the pervasive fact that most histories of non-Euro-American spaces read by western scholars are produced outside of the places they examine.

中文翻译：

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介绍

本期特刊中的文章探讨了来自非洲、加勒比、拉丁美洲、南亚和中东的方法论、语言和来源为科学和技术史提供的可能性和挑战。它们旨在成为简短的“思考片断”，挑衅性地提出替代术语、时间性和空间性。这些文章质疑了“西方”和非西方历史参与者之间现有的关联范式、关于发展的古板观念，以及欧美的分类和模型在检查一个定义不明确和总体化的科学史内部和外部的有用性。西。这些文章中的大部分是从 2017 年 4 月在哈佛大学举办的“重新映射和（Dis）定位全球科学和医学史”研讨会上提交的更大组的预先分发的论文草稿中选出的。从 16 世纪到 21 世纪的五个多世纪，都偏离了本地化的案例研究。我们特别要求贡献者创造性地使用新的语言和方法来说明如何为旧历史产生新的含义。本期特刊中的大多数作者都来自他们写作的空间，但没有人居住在那里。这很重要，因为地点，而且必须重复，欧美关于所谓全球的讨论不可避免的地方性深刻地塑造了我们提出的问题和方法的类型——特别是从我们的分析镜头的起源和指向哪里。此外，我们的居住地可以——而且确实——决定了我们生产的东西是否会引发与同龄人的对话或陷入无私的空虚。我们希望这个问题能引发关于西方学者阅读的大多数非欧美空间历史都是在他们研究的地方之外产生的普遍事实的进一步对话。