History of Technology

Evidence in Science, Medicine, Technology and Society

DFG Research Unit 2448

Evidence is continually growing in importance for political, societal, and individual decisions, despite increasing talk of an impending ‘post-factual era’. Evidence is based on data that is collected in a scientific fashion, but is also a social phenomenon. How and by whom is it created and used, and what impact does this have? These are the main questions that our Research Group has set out to investigate.

Since evidence is an issue that concern many different scientific disciplines, our group is interdisciplinary in outlook. Our six sub-projects include scholars from the subject areas History of Technology, Sociology of Science/MCTS, History and Ethics of Medicine, Marketing and Consumer Research, as well as History of Science and Technology.

Geographically, we are centered in the Munich/Upper Bavaria region: The Technical University Munich (TUM), the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU), the University of Augsburg and the Research Institut of the Deutsches Museum are all part of our group. Other members of our group are based at the University of Bonn, the University of Mainz and the University of Giessen.

The Research Unit is funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).