Beyond Kiel. History of science of the quantitative theoretical turn in German speaking Geography from historical network perspective and uneven geographies.

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Boris Michel
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: from 2016 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 332948674

From the perspective of the philosophy of science and scientific practices the so called >quantitative revolution< in the history of German geography, is one of the disciplines major turning points. At the same time there is not jet a sound historiographic analysis of this quantitative-theoretic turn in the German speaking Geography. The disciplines story as it is told in general overviews, introductory literature, new theoretical concepts but also in informal narratives only focuses on a few singular incidents (German conference of Geographers in 1969 und Dietrich Bartels habilitation >Zur wissenschaftstheoretischen Grundlegung einer Geographie des Menschen< 1968). This way of looking at it doesn´t stand up to an exact historical investigation und produces a narrative of the discipline of geography that is in a problematic way simplified and straightened.Based on new approaches in the history of science and projects concerning this phase in the Anglophone geography we propose a research project that aims to tell the Story of the quantitative theoretical turn as a more complex, heterogeneous and ambivalent process than it is up until now. The project plans to present more than a history of ideas perspective, but to understand science as a social, embodied, material und local practice. Hence the project fills a void in the current way of dealing with the disciplines history, at present it focuses mainly on the classical and landscape Geography and the relation between geography and National social-ism.Therefore we propose a double approach on the subject: 1) In the form of an historical network analysis, which analyses the German speaking geography of the 1950ies- 1970ies in a systematically and broad manner. The historical network research as an explorative method to describe relations, positions and interactions in networks of people, institutions and knowledge, provides the opportunity to destabilize the ex-post formulated und produced narra-tives of central actors and occurrences/incidents.2) Based on that we are planning to show with a local and location-specific perspective that there were a number of local >quantitative Revolutions< that produced independent and con-tradictory understandings beyond the unified/ dominant paradigm of the >quantitative Revolution<. This local ways of quantitative-theoretical thinking in the field of geography created a more diverse practice than shown in conceptual reasoning. A historiographic analysis of the quantitative-theoretic turn is also of interest in the context of an historical perspective on the discipline (in terms of the necessity of an adequate under-standing of the historicity of theories and concepts) as well as for recent problems (concerning similar discussions about a new quantitative turn and Big data being conducted without men-tioning the historical debate at all) and therefore a matter of urgency.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants