The MSCA-funded project "Poles and People" investigates the interconnections between scientific institutions, statehood, and civil society by examining geographical societies in Brussels, Edinburgh, Kristiania (Oslo), and Vienna during a period of profound political, scientific, and social transformation between 1870 and 1925. In contrast to dominant narratives that focus on metropolitan centres such as London or Paris, the project deliberately explores scientific life in cities at the margins of European power hierarchies in order to reassess the role of scientific societies in shaping imperial visions and transnational cooperation.
The project centres on two types of geographical space that gained extraordinary epistemic and symbolic significance in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the Polar Regions and so-called “inner Africa.” These territories—portrayed as hostile, unmapped, and culturally distant—were seen as "epistemic frontiers": contested zones where scientific knowledge was produced under extreme conditions, and where political, cultural, and environmental imaginaries intersected. Far from being peripheral, these spaces functioned as laboratories for experimentation, legitimising new forms of scientific practice and state intervention.
Geographical societies served as institutional bridges between civic curiosity, imperial ambition, and scholarly innovation. As platforms of exploration and popularisation, they mobilised resources, established new standards for geographical knowledge, and framed public perceptions of unfamiliar environments. Poles and People aims to understand how these societies helped consolidate geography as a discipline and how they negotiated tensions between national loyalty and international cooperation in the sciences.
