2025 marks fifteen years since Sujit Sivasundaram published the groundbreaking article “Sciences and the Global: On Methods, Questions, and Theory” in an Isis Focus Section on “Global Histories of Science”. Here, Sivasundaram encouraged scholars interested in writing globally oriented histories of the sciences to adopt a method of “cross-contextualization, where scarce and unorthodox sources are read within and alongside more plentiful and traditional ones.” Recontextualizing sources away from their usual sites of interpretation has thickened historical narratives, offering deeper, decentred, and typically more inclusive accounts of knowledge production. Perhaps more importantly, cross-contextualization as a method also promises – or, depending on one’s positionality, threatens – to perturb long-established scholarly boundaries of what counts as bona fide historical evidence.

Since the publication of Sivasundaram’s article, methods of cross-contextualization are transcending the boundaries of the history of science. Environmental historians have pioneered the integration of diverse types of archives – both “social” and “natural” – to construct “planetary” narratives of the past. Indeed, scholars are responding to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call to “put geological time and the biological time of evolution in conversation with the time of human history and experience.” Concomitantly, global and cultural historians are increasingly engaging with anthropological, art-historical, and archaeological scholarship, enriching or complicating narratives offered from the vantage-point of more conventional sources. Outside of academic history, curators are interweaving material analysis with acquisition information and textual sources to challenge traditional display practices, while grappling with the politics of museums and questions of repatriation and decolonization. These varied efforts at cross-contextualization (whether explicitly named as such) have functioned to recover practices and perspectives often characterized as irretrievably lost, promising fruitful interdisciplinary collaborations on and off the page.

This workshop will will critically examine how methods akin to cross-contextualization are being reworked more widely – both within and beyond the global history of science. We have invited participants to consider: “Who and what gets to speak in history, and why?”; “How can historians restore the voices, perspectives, and products of the dispossessed to challenge elite histories?”; and, consequently, “What counts as a legitimate historical source?” Drawing on collaborative reflections, the workshop aims to reimagine how scholars, curators, activists, teachers, and students can ultimately produce more emancipatory understandings of the past, reframing commonplace historiographical conventions.

The workshop is organised by Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh (University of Amsterdam) and Mika Hyman (University of Cambridge). We acknowledge support from the Leverhulme Trust for funding this workshop through Giovannetti-Singh’s Early Career Fellowship (ECF-2023-399), and from the George Macauley Trevelyan Fund of the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge.