The article argues that, contrary to what is often held in academic literature, traditional fishermen had solid empirical knowledge about underwater topography long before acoustic sounding. To substantiate the argument, a large mid twentieth-century collection of place names and terms collected among coastal fishermen in Norway is explored, with the aim to demonstrate that this vocabulary reflects a detailed knowledge about underwater geography as well as advanced navigational skills. The second aim of the article is to investigate the reformatting of this knowledge when it was first transferred to national fisheries maps and secondly when it entered the International Court of Justice as part of the Norwegian fisheries case against the UK in 1951. Reformatting represents more than a new context: It shapes and changes knowledge. The present article applies this more general principle of knowledge transformation to the study of the human–ocean relationship and explores how reformatting has decisively impacted activities at sea, influenced parameters for ocean use, and been constitutive to shaping the ocean as an object of knowledge.

In this paper I present a case study of the creation of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which provided the first image of a black hole shadow (April 2019) and that of the central black hole of the Milky Way (May 2022), as one in which the collaborative approach was primarily motivated by strong epistemic needs. To this end, I introduce and explore the notion of “epistemic constraint,” meaning any component of the world that prevents us from gaining some definite kind of knowledge in a specific manner and allows or promotes some other specific kind of knowledge in defined ways. The collaborative approach that led to the recent images of black hole shadows through the EHT is described in terms of “epistemically constrained collaboration” – i.e., a collaborative mode of research where the epistemic constraints prevail over other factors – and the most important features of this concept are expounded.

This article develops a praxeological perspective on the history of partisanship in Central and Eastern Europe. The author proposes to examine partisanship not as an idea or a concept but as a virtue that was supposed to be forcibly cultivated and practiced in science and scholarship under Soviet domination. The article focuses on the cases of two prominent Marxist philosophers, Arnošt Kolman and Adam Schaff, who became devoted teachers of partisanship in the Soviet Union as well as in their “native” Czechoslovakia and Poland. Later, both were publicly accused of “non-partisanship.” Based on these examples, the author argues that, with the establishment of the socialist regimes, partisanship became a tool of maintaining stability. This implied more autonomy for the scholars and scientists who learned how to use the quasi-moral authority of partisanship to exclude from the “moral consensus” those who, due to their “excessive diligence,” threatened the internal norms and conventions.

Over a four-year period from 1909 to 1913, the German expedition to Tendaguru removed 250 metric tons of dinosaur fossils from what is now Tanzania and was then part of the colony of German East Africa. To this day, these fossils – some of them now world-famous exhibits – are held in Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde. Using hitherto unexamined sources, this paper reveals how the expedition’s leaders translated their initial mission of “thorough excavation” into a strategy of total extraction, leading them to amass thousands of additional animals, plant samples, and cultural artifacts that were subsequently distributed among Berlin’s national museums. It shows that this multi-institutional and transdisciplinary colonial archive relied heavily on colonial infrastructures and violence and argues that collecting in this context must be understood as an enactment of power. Following Dan Hicks, it asks how this history might be interpreted within a theory of taking.