Do we need a policy of IUHPS towards popular presentations of our research?

This paper raises a crucial issue -that of our responsibility towards the misrepresentation of our research in public spaces by popular organizations or individual amateurs. The reason for proposing a debate about the need of a policy adopted by IUHPS is situated in my negative experience to stimulate a public debate with major public organizations such as the Science Museum in London or National Geographic in D.C. as well as our own professional organizations about the heavy distortion of research results on the histories of sciences in Islamicate societies by the exhibition 1001 Inventions and its accompanying book presentations.

In my paper, I will present first the policy pursued by 1001 Inventions and the scholarly claims made by its organizers. I will then illustrate the organizer's deviation from their claims in favor of very simplistic and ideologically grounded distortions of the past with a few of the most glaring examples. I will situate this abuse of history of science in shortcomings of our own academic practices. I will argue that the failure of our professional organizations to formulate policies towards the popular representation of our research and to encourage members to actively participate in translating their research for the broader public in a manner that does not distort the past by any kind of distorting narrative is partly responsible for today’s abysmal situation. I will show that these ideologically grounded misrepresentations of our research permeate by now large parts of public spaces (the Internet, major newspapers, popular books, TV and film productions). This raises several problems, in particular for our students, but also among larger communities across the globe who mistake such popular fantasies for 'truth' and build political as well as cultural beliefs on them, that we have to take seriously and confront in an active manner. My principled stance is that we do not only have a responsibility for the quality of our research, but also for its use and abuse in public spaces and the consequences arising thereof.

This presentation is part of a larger book project that will bring together colleagues from different fields of history of science and art history as well as museum curators to discuss these problematic issues of how to present complex historical phenomena for the broad public without distorting the past.