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When religion meets history of technology: Secularism and the problem of the sacred History and Technology Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Enrico Beltramini
Despite the growing scholarly work at the intersection of religion and technology, how to characterize their relationship remains a matter of dispute for historians of technology. This essay levera...
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The search for new models for organizing regional agricultural research in the post-colonial era: Rice in West Africa History and Technology Pub Date : 2024-02-02 John Lynam, Megan McNeil Zandstra, Derek Byerlee
The West African Rice Development Association (WARDA), created in 1971 as a regional network of rice research stations and governed by member countries, was unique within the system of internationa...
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Technologies of a humble natural resource: The sand mining industry and marginal value in Bombay/Mumbai, 1920-2020 History and Technology Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Rachel Sturman
Like many other natural resources, sand has become integral to technologies that symbolize modernity and development, but that depend upon an imperative of low cost. In India, sand began to be comm...
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Introduction History and Technology Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Amy E. Slaton, Tiago Saraiva
Published in History and Technology: An International Journal (Vol. 39, No. 2, 2023)
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Editorial History and Technology Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Amy E. Slaton, Tiago Saraiva
Published in History and Technology: An International Journal (Vol. 39, No. 2, 2023)
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CORONALAG: time, place, and power in Pandemic Year One History and Technology Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Malka Older, Scott Gabriel Knowles
This paper introduces the idea of Coronalag, a concept derived from the experience of disaster time in 2020, and one that we hope assists in the ongoing interrogation of time as a venue for the exe...
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Canaries, camouflets, and carbon monoxide: making ‘Proto Man’ in Britain’s tunnelling war 1915–1918 History and Technology Pub Date : 2023-12-21 James Esposito
Focused mainly on the gas mask, historians of technology have paid little attention to the use of oxygen breathing apparatus in World War I. This article explores how an assemblage of technology, a...
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Processing mortality data otherwise: making history in a turbulent sea History and Technology Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Jacqueline D. Wernimont
Written in the midst of the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, this piece grapples with the failures of traditional academic history writing to grapple with the affective nature of writing histo...
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Correction History and Technology Pub Date : 2023-11-14
Published in History and Technology: An International Journal (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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The ordinary lives of crisis: transformations in the realm of work in South Africa and Romania History and Technology Pub Date : 2023-09-07 Alina-Sandra Cucu, Bridget Kenny
2020 emerged as a ‘crisis in the world of work’. Reflections upon how the pandemic would accelerate pervasive joblessness and changes in the workplace abounded, while academics and technocrats alik...
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Irreplicability in methodology: embracing the historical contingencies of educational technology research during the 2020–2021 United States school year History and Technology Pub Date : 2023-09-04 Michael Lachney, Madison C. Allen Kuyenga
The claim that research should prioritize qualities of replicability is foundational to scientific knowledge production. At the same time, replication is not an algorithm but instead based on a dis...
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Tracing viral trajectories. Epistemic and bodily reservoirs in interspecies health History and Technology Pub Date : 2023-09-04 Marianna Szczygielska, Agata Kowalewska
Emerging infectious diseases draw critical attention to the human–animal interface for understanding and explaining global health crises. These include zoonoses that directly affect human health, a...
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Correction History and Technology Pub Date : 2023-07-18
Published in History and Technology: An International Journal (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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Fatigue as a physiological problem: experiments in the observation and quantification of movement and industrial labor, 1873-1947 History and Technology Pub Date : 2023-06-28 Mark Paterson
ABSTRACT The period 1873–1947 was productive in fostering ideas about observing, measuring, and quantifying repetitive human movements, prior to the rise of occupational health and ergonomics within industrial psychology. Starting with physiological experimentation in the lab, instruments of graphic inscription were then applied in the industrial workplace, initially as a benevolent measurement for
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”The sparrow loves millet, but labors not”: Energy use and infrastructure in the Senegal Vally, 1450-1760 History and Technology Pub Date : 2023-06-28 John Cropper
ABSTRACT This article examines the history of precolonial energy use in the Senegal Valley from 1450–1760, showing how the Wolof kingdoms developed technologically sophisticated systems of energy use to construct an infrastructure of what I call ‘organic refineries’. As co-constructed sites of energy use, technological innovation, and material production, the organic refineries of the Senegal Valley
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Black metallurgists and the making of the industrial revolution History and Technology Pub Date : 2023-06-21 Jenny Bulstrode
ABSTRACT Metallurgy is the art and science of working metals, separating them from other substances and removing impurities. This paper is concerned with the Black metallurgists on whose art and science the intensive industries; military bases; and maritime networks of British enslaver colonialism in eighteenth-century Jamaica depended. To engage with these metallurgists on their own terms, the paper
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Electrical futures for a regenerated Spain: electricity, engineering and national reconstruction after the 1898 ‘Disaster’ History and Technology Pub Date : 2023-05-15 Daniel Pérez-Zapico
ABSTRACT This article examines the multifaceted political and cultural meanings of electrical supply and technologies in a context of recent loss of an empire and a contested nation-building process. It explores how some Spanish engineers employed electricity to articulate a nationalist modernism that saw electricity as a secure path to development and industrialization, particularly following the
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‘The Goddess Technology is a polyglot’: a critical review of Eric Schatzberg, Technology: critical history of a concept History and Technology Pub Date : 2023-04-28 Francesca Bray, Barbara Hahn
ABSTRACT The modern concept of technology, we argue, is not the product of an exclusively Western and intellectual genealogy, as proposed by Eric Schatzberg in Technology: Critical History of a Concept. Instead its emergence must be understood as the product of a worldwide ferment, polyglot dialogue and heterogenous conceptual traditions, a global assemblage whose local manifestations took shape concurrently
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Aircraft without wings: local design and serial production of utilitarian vehicles in Argentina (1952-1955) History and Technology Pub Date : 2023-04-24 Facundo Picabea
ABSTRACT In Euro-US-centric historical accounts, Latin America has been traditionally characterized as a region that produces goods with little added value, an exporter of agricultural commodities in the periphery of the world economy. However, recent historiographic trends have suggested the historical significance of experiences with development in the region in which state structures consistently
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Use and users of artificial insemination in Swedish dairy cattle breeding, 1935–1955 History and Technology Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Karl Bruno
ABSTRACT From the middle of the twentieth century, the new technologies and techniques of artificial insemination (a.i.) transformed dairy cattle husbandry and breeding across dairy-producing countries. While there are nuanced and multi-faceted studies of early a.i., previous work has not engaged much with its material usage, meaning that we know little about how different techniques, practices, and
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Making history: technologies of production and the estate of knowledge in East Asia History and Technology Pub Date : 2023-02-02 Victor Seow, Dagmar Schäfer
ABSTRACT How did production, the making of things, come to be regarded as an inferior part of the process from the conceptualization of a commodity to its consumption? And how did East Asia, which has long been a place of production, come concurrently to be dismissed by other global actors on account of that fact and denied the potential for innovation? Through detailed case studies of making and doing
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Reverse engineering as history and method: The Portuguese espingarda in Chosŏn Korea History and Technology Pub Date : 2023-02-02 Hyeok Hweon Kang
ABSTRACT How does one reverse engineer a technical artefact, let alone build a system of knowledge, use, and production around it? This article investigates Korean artisans and practitioners in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and their efforts to understand and rebuild the Portuguese espingarda (matchlock musket). What emerges, first, is a hitherto untold story of how a global artefact became
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Making waste one’s own: transformations in production by resting paper, or hyuji, in Chosŏn Korea History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-12-19 Jung Lee
ABSTRACT This article discusses how paper artisans in Chosŏn Korea transformed the once government-controlled paper production into their own prosperous trade, by focusing on their techniques for recycling paper. They called the paper they made that was not in use ‘resting paper’, and referred to its reuse, which they facilitated, as a process of ‘returning’. These recycling techniques were unique
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Making raw materials: innovation and imported technology in Meiji Japan History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-12-08 Aleksandra Kobiljski, Sarah Teasley
ABSTRACT This article explores coal and wood manufacturing in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan as the empirical sites for understanding the material gaps between industrial inputs available locally and the affordances of imported technology. It demonstrates how the process of making coking coals for steel smelting and wooden boards for furniture-making challenge a conceptual framework
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Manufacturing hands: robot fingers and human labour in post-war Japan History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-11-02 Yulia Frumer
ABSTRACT This article argues that automation engineering in 1960s Japan was rooted in colonial attitudes towards human labour, which were tacitly present in Japan even decades after its defeat in World War II. I make this argument by examining the development of Japan’s first modern robot, a three-fingered mechanical hand designed by Tokyo University graduate student Yamashita Tadashi in 1963. Exploring
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Before localization: the story of the electric rice cooker in South Korea History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-10-20 Hyungsub Choi
ABSTRACT The commonplace way to tell the global history of the electric rice cooker is to begin with its invention in Japan, then trace its adaptation and localization as it spread through the Asian region. This article focuses on the period before the 1990s, when rice cookers in South Korea remained inferior imitations of the Japanese models. After the introduction of the rice cooker in 1965, the
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About the Cover History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-08-30 Amy Slaton, Tiago Saraiva
Published in History and Technology: An International Journal (Vol. 38, No. 1, 2022)
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Disaster (continued): Sewol Ferry investigations, state violence, and political history in South Korea History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-08-11 Chihyung Jeon, Scott Gabriel Knowles, Sang-Eun Park
ABSTRACT The Special Investigation Commission on the 4/16 Sewol Ferry Disaster offers a case in which the process of disaster investigation becomes a part, even a continuation, of the disaster for which it is created to bring closure. Placing the investigation in a longer temporality reveals obscured historical factors that shaped the investigation and its aftermath in surprising and crucial ways.
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Turning DDT into ‘Didimac’: Making insecticide products and consumers in British farming after 1945 History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Sabine Clarke, Thomas Lean
ABSTRACT This paper examines the adoption of DDT and other insecticides in British farming after 1945 to consider the notion that new synthetic insecticides were taken up rapidly. It shows that the uptake of chemical insecticides during the 1940s and 1950s was slower in many agricultural sectors than accounts have often suggested, and slower than the uptake of other agrochemicals, such as herbicides
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The training in France of Spanish nuclear personnel, c. 1950s–1990s History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-06-22 Esther M. Sánchez Sánchez
ABSTRACT Foreign assistance was decisive in the formation of the teams in charge of nuclear science, technology and industry in Spain. France played a key role from the end of World War Two, assisting Spanish expertise in all stages of the uranium cycle, from mining to disposal. In this paper, after examining the configuration of the French nuclear complex and the start of French-Spanish cooperation
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‘Sovereignty of the air’: The Indian princely states, the British Empire and carving out of air-space (1911–1933) History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-06-21 Priya Mirza
ABSTRACT Who owns the skies? Under British colonialism, the ownership of the skies of India was a contested matter. The onset of aviation presented a challenge to the territorial understanding between the British and semi-sovereign Indian princes, Paramountcy (1858–1947). Technology itself was a tricky area: roadways, railways, telegraphs, and the wireless were nibbling away at the sovereign spheres
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Lessons from a forgotten fuel: assessing the long history of alcohol fuel advocacy and use in the United States History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-04-04 Jeffrey T. Manuel
ABSTRACT Debates over biofuels in the twenty-first century rarely consider the long history of producing and consuming biofuels. This article assesses that long history of biofuels in the United States. First, the article periodizes a century and a half of biofuels into six distinct eras: (1) the camphene era (1830s-1860s) when alcohol was used for illumination, (2) the early automobile era (1900–1920)
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Lessons from a forgotten fuel: assessing the long history of alcohol fuel advocacy and use in the United States History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-04-04 Jeffrey T. Manuel
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Putting oceans to work: tidal energy in the USA and the USSR, 1930–1970 History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-03-31 Felix Frey
ABSTRACT Aspirations to convert the movement of ebb and flow into electricity have a long and checkered history. Proposals for tidal power plants at Passamaquoddy Bay (Maine/New Brunswick) and in the Soviet Murmansk region emerged in the 1920s and were discussed well into the 1960s. Considering that tidal power had to compete with established energy sources like coal, oil, and conventional hydropower
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Driving on wood: the Swedish transition to wood gas during World War Two History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-03-31 Arne Kaijser
ABSTRACT This article is about the rapid transition to gasifiers in Sweden during World War Two, which made it possible to fuel cars with domestic wood instead of petrol, the imports of which seized during the war. The transition had been prepared in the interwar period and was executed very effectively in the beginning of the war. However, when the war was over and petrol became available again most
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Driving on wood. The Swedish transition to wood gas during World War Two History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-03-31 Arne Kaijser
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Putting oceans to work: tidal energy in the USA and the USSR, 1930–1970 History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-03-31 Felix Frey
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Wind power and rural modernization: wind-powered water supply systems in northern Germany and southern France, 1880–1950 History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-03-21 Nicole Hesse
ABSTRACT The article analyzes mechanical wind-powered water supply systems situated in southern France and northern Germany in the time period between 1880 and 1950, when wind energy was not yet framed as a renewable, but as a rural, decentralized, and manageable solution to generate energy. Using a local approach, I highlight wind energy use in rural areas of Western societies as part of the non-synchronical
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Wind power and rural modernization: wind-powered water supply systems in northern Germany and southern France, 1880–1950 History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-03-21 Nicole Hesse
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The materiality of space heating: heat pumps and heating transitions in Twentieth-century Switzerland History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-03-10 Irene Pallua
ABSTRACT In the past thirty years, heat pumps have increasingly gained importance in Switzerland as an environmentally-friendly technology for space heating. The paper traces their history of back to World War One when their use was first envisioned by experts in order to save coal. Despite promising pilot projects, heat pumps were marginalized by the end of the 1950s. It was only in the 1990s that
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The materiality of space heating: heat pumps and heating transitions in 20th-century Switzerland History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-03-10 Irene Pallua
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The revolt of the chemists: biofuels, agricultural overproduction, and the chemurgy movement in New Deal America History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-03-03 Frank Uekötter
ABSTRACT This article proposes a new reading of the chemurgy movement in New Deal America. It shows that the quest for renewable energy was rooted in a vision of a new economy based on chemical knowledge. Rather than a goal in itself, fuel alcohol for automotive uses was meant to showcase the problem-solving power of chemists and the urgency to put chemists in charge on all levels. The article places
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Eliminating fossil fuels: Iceland’s transition from coal and oil to geothermal district heating, 1930–1980 History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-03-03 Odinn Melsted
ABSTRACT Between 1930 and 1980, Iceland’s heating sector was decarbonized,as geothermal district heating utilities became the common form of heating. The ‘elimination’ of fuels in heating, as Icelanders called it,entailed the replacement of imported coal and oil with domestically available geothermal energy. Analyzing which natural, technological, social and economic factors helped – or hindered –
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The revolt of the chemists: biofuels, agricultural overproduction, and the chemurgy movement in New Deal America History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-03-03 Frank Uekötter
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Eliminating fossil fuels: Iceland’s transition from coal and oil to geothermal district heating, 1930–1980 History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-03-03 Odinn Melsted
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Historicizing renewables: issues and challenges History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-03-02 Ute Hasenöhrl, Patrick Kupper
ABSTRACT The essay discusses some main challenges involved in historicizing renewables. It highlights three approaches that we regard as central for re- and deconstructing the history of renewables, and which show potential for rethinking familiar narratives in both the history of technology and environmental history. First, we argue that the adoption or rejection of renewables was specific to place
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Historicizing renewables: issues and challenges History and Technology Pub Date : 2022-03-02 Ute Hasenöhrl,Patrick Kupper
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‘We were shot down!’: Earth observing satellites, data surveillance, and NASA’s 1982 Global Habitability initiative History and Technology Pub Date : 2021-07-03 Jenifer Barton
ABSTRACT At a United Nations space conference in 1982, NASA officials unveiled Global Habitability, an Earth science initiative to study the physical, chemical, and biological processes of the world’s lands, oceans, and atmosphere as a single, integrated system using a fleet of Earth observing satellites. A peaceful and timely initiative that focused on global environmental problems and invited international
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On humble technologies: containers, care, and water infrastructure in northwest Madagascar, 1750s-1960s History and Technology Pub Date : 2021-07-03 Tasha Rijke-Epstein
ABSTRACT Anchored in urban Madagascar, this study probes historical entanglements between water systems, containers as ordinary technological things, and labor regimes from the late eighteenth century through French colonial times (1896–1960). As technologies-in-use, water containers were sometimes materials of governance, but increasingly they were anticipatory technologies through which families
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Modernizing a nation through its radio and television industry: RCA Victor in Chile, 1928-1973 History and Technology Pub Date : 2021-07-03 Francisco Garrido,Ricardo Paredes
ABSTRACT The RCA Victor company in Chile portrayed itself as a participant in the nation’s progress. Its success was part of a larger governmental plan to boost the industrial capacities of the country, during a period marked by political polarization and extensive demographic changes in terms of rural to urban migration, the formation of a working middle class, and greater investment in education
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Reassembling colonial infrastructure in Cold War Korea: the Han River Basin Joint Survey Project (1966-71) History and Technology Pub Date : 2021-07-03 Seohyun Park
ABSTRACT This article explores how the Han River Basin Joint Survey Team (HJST), consisting of American and Korean engineers, planned the Han River Basin development project in South Korea during the late 1960s and the early 1970s. While much of the existing literature adopts the lens of Cold War geopolitics, arguing that American political and technical elites drove worldwide river basin development
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Front-line Fowl: Messenger Pigeons as Communications Technology in the U.S. Army History and Technology Pub Date : 2021-04-03 Alice Shackelford Clifton-Morekis
ABSTRACT The United States Army Signal Corps maintained a program for communication by messenger pigeon from 1917 to 1957, long after developments in electronic communications technology rendered pigeons obsolete in many contexts. This article presents the history of the Signal Corps Pigeon Service as one of technological persistence and innovation. It argues that messenger pigeons remained significantly
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Energy, history, and the humanities: against a new determinism History and Technology Pub Date : 2021-04-03 Thomas Turnbull
ABSTRACT The study of past ‘energy transitions’ are being reinterpreted as possible guides to a low-carbon future. But little is known about the historians who shaped how we understand our transition into a predominantly hydrocarbon-based energy system. Before energy history emerged as a subfield, historians John Nef, Edward Wrigley, and Rolf Sieferle already explained the Industrial Revolution as
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Uranium exposed at Expo 58: the colonial agenda behind the peaceful atom History and Technology Pub Date : 2021-04-03 Dennis Pohl
ABSTRACT This research focuses on the staged contrast between atomic modernity and colonial backwardness at Expo 58 in Brussels, as a strategic promise of the peaceful nuclear, powered by Congolese uranium. I analyze the management of nuclear power – ranging from household technologies to European (post)colonial infrastructures of uranium resources and nuclear power plants – to reveal architecture
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The tools of tailoring as technologies-in-use in twentieth century Benin, West Africa History and Technology Pub Date : 2021-04-03 Elizabeth Ann Fretwell
ABSTRACT Beninois tailors use sewing machines to make made-to-order clothing for clients and they award and display artisanal diplomas that attest to the completion of an apprenticeship with a master tailor. This article traces the history of these materials to argue that missions, states, and artisans used the tools of tailoring to construct and contest identities and to assert new notions of social
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Three tons of uranium from the International Atomic Energy Agency: diplomacy over nuclear fuel for the Japan Research Reactor-3 at the Board of Governors’ meetings, 1958–1959 History and Technology Pub Date : 2021-01-02 Kenji Ito
ABSTRACT This paper combines renewed attention to science diplomacy with the rising interest in material and ontological aspects of science studies. It examines nuclear diplomacy by reviewing negotiations over three tons of natural uranium that the Japanese government requested from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1958. The uranium was half the amount required for the Japan Research
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The ‘conceit of controllability’: nuclear diplomacy, Japan’s plutonium reprocessing ambitions and US proliferation fears, 1974-1978 History and Technology Pub Date : 2021-01-02 Fintan Hoey
ABSTRACT US-Japanese nuclear diplomacy on plutonium reprocessing was a means by which both attempted to assert control. For Japan, this meant control over its energy supplies and the status associated with advanced nuclear power technology. Japan had emerged as an economic giant but had accepted a diminution in status by adhering to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and was determined not to have
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From lobbyists to backstage diplomats: how insurers in the field of third party liability shaped nuclear diplomacy History and Technology Pub Date : 2021-01-02 Alexandros-Andreas Kyrtsis,Maria Rentetzi
ABSTRACT Third party liability insurance in the event of nuclear accidents emerged as a pressing issue in the 1950s, triggered to a great extent by the activities of international organizations and major nuclear accidents. By the mid-1960s a tight international network of negotiators comprising insurers, lawyers, scientists, engineers, businessmen, and government officials made its appearance along
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The ways and means of ITER: reciprocity and compromise in fusion science diplomacy History and Technology Pub Date : 2021-01-02 Anna Åberg
ABSTRACT ITER (short for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, and the Latin word for ‘the way’, as in ‘the way to new energy’), a controlled thermonuclear fusion experiment currently being built in Cadarache, France, is one of the world’s largest technoscientific collaborations. ITER’s complex organisation is rooted in decisions taken during the early negotiation phase in the 1990s. This
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The co-production of nuclear science and diplomacy: towards a transnational understanding of nuclear things History and Technology Pub Date : 2021-01-02 Kenji Ito,Maria Rentetzi
ABSTRACT This paper proposes diplomatic studies of science as a new field of research, which sheds light on actual diplomatic processes as an integral part of knowledge making and presents the notion of nuclear science and diplomacy as co-produced. Science and diplomacy display fundamental similarities: scientists attempt to make knowledge produced locally seem global, thereby achieving universal epistemic