Independent research and field-building. Remote-first, headquartered in Boston.
Futures Center / Kuhn Update Project
Thomas Kuhn's model of scientific revolutions has shaped how researchers, institutions, and funders understand the structure of scientific progress for over sixty years. But the conditions Kuhn described, stable periods of normal science punctuated by rare paradigm shifts, may no longer hold. Discovery cycles have compressed. Fields form, fragment, and recombine faster than institutional structures can track. Interdisciplinary work complicates the notion of a single reigning paradigm. And the relationship between scientific communities and external pressures (funding, policy, industry) has changed in ways that Kuhn's framework does not account for.
This internship contributes to JOPRO's Kuhn Update project, which asks whether the classical model of scientific revolutions needs to be revised, extended, or replaced. The project examines Kuhn alongside other theorists of scientific change (Lakatos, Feyerabend, Laudan, and more recent work in philosophy of science) and investigates what happens when the temporal and institutional assumptions built into these models break down.
Three papers are outlined. The first examines the temporal argument: what happens to paradigm structure when the pace of scientific change accelerates, drawing on work by Hartmut Rosa on social acceleration and Douglas Rushkoff on temporal compression. The second addresses institutional dynamics: how funding structures, publication incentives, and industry entanglement may suppress or distort the process of paradigm competition. The third is constructive: if the classical model no longer holds, what provisional frameworks might replace it?
The intern would contribute to literature review, help develop the argument for one paper in the series, and contribute annotated bibliography entries. The project is part of JOPRO's broader Foundation of Alternatives research, which investigates how established intellectual frameworks can be productively updated rather than simply inherited or discarded.
Graduate students in philosophy of science, history of science, STS, or sociology of knowledge. Familiarity with Kuhn is expected. Interest in how models of scientific change hold up under contemporary conditions, including accelerating discovery, interdisciplinary blurring, and institutional pressures on research, is essential.
The project's three-paper structure and annotated bibliography already exist. The intern joins an active research line, not a blank slate.
Or email start@jopro.org with your statement of interest and CV.