Authority Claims. Situating Socialist Science Studies in the GDR

This essay studies the narrative self-positioning of Science Studies in the German Democratic Republic during the 1980s. Drawing on archival material on the foundation of the Council for Marxist-Leninist Science Studies at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin in March 1988, it analyses how boundaries between Science Studies as a lone standing discipline and several other fields were construed and crossed at the same time and how (scientific) authority was claimed from the intermediate position of an external insider. Not only did Science Studies engage with their subject - the sciences -, but also with the politics of the Socialist Party, with the institution of the Academy, and with (industrial) production. After a formative institutional phase that spanned across the 1970s, Science Studies made efforts to centralize their work during the 1980s, to bind themselves closer to the state and scientific institutions, and to distinguish themselves from them at the same time.