Postdoctoral Fellow, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
Since 2010 Josh Berson has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, where he is involved in the working group “Endangerment and Its Consequences.” Prior to coming to Berlin, Josh held a visiting fellowship at the Institute for the Human Sciences, Vienna. His work joins the interpretive persepectives of science and technology studies and linguistic anthropology. His research is principally concerned, first, with how register boundaries between different kinds of expertise, in particular social science expertise, become productive sites for the articulation of law and public policy, and second, with how abstract registers of economic value (including intellectual property in its various forms together with financial derivatives, tradable emissions allowances, and so on) shape the articulation of property and value in material space. Since 2005 he has explored these themes through a history of linguistic fieldwork in northern Australia. He is in the process of bringing this work to publication in book form. Josh holds a PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania.
