Abstracts Archive

The presentation will focus on the mutagenesis program in agriculture implemented by the Italian Atomic Energy Commission (CNRN-CNEN), starting from 1956, through the establishment of a specific technological and experimental system: the so-called “gamma field”, a piece of agricultural land with...

In the nineteenth century, air started to be considered not just as an element, but as a techno-scientific resource. The laws of thermodynamics provided an instrument to exploit air power (specifically, pressured air), and scientists and engineers thought about using it, among others, for the transp...

The unprecedented speed of telegraphic communication was the source of considerable excitement across Europe during the nineteenth century. The technology, it was often held, heralded a new age of instantaneous interpersonal communication, which would simplify the conduct of business, politics, and ...

In this paper, Hui examines the proliferating and often conflicting attitudes about background music in laboring and public spaces from the 1940s through the 60s. It was alternately described as a tool of fascism, a tool of communism, a solution to petty crime, a form of therapy, a delightful experi...

We live amidst a “biometric revolution,” a moment of accelerated development of technologies that identify individuals and secure societies by measuring and surveilling bodies. Those technologies centered on the head and the face are advancing especially quickly, exemplified by the growing use o...

A few programmable computers existed already in the 19-thirties and forties. Around 1955, larger numbers of commercially produced computers became available. In the years 1968-1974, researchers working in different fields of mathematics and physics met at international conferences with titles like `...

No criminal defendant, in principle, has to prove his own innocence. It is enough to sow doubt about the argument that the prosecution is making: in dubio pro reo (when in doubt, for the accused). Yet suspects and their defence attorneys frequently attempt to do just that. In their efforts they may ...

This talk centers on the “African Horse Sickness” that plagued the Middle East for the first time in 1944, resulting in the termination of thousands of animal lives. In that context, equines were cardinal to agricultural work and economy, to connecting rural and urban areas as transporters of go...

In 1980, Starehe School in Nairobi became the first Kenyan second-level institution to introduce computer education. From a small pilot-scheme reliant on the University of Nairobi’s mainframe computer, Starehe’s program expanded rapidly. Student enthusiasm and an ambitious school leadership conv...

In the 20th century, agrarian change was dominated by the industrial ideal, in which both farms and farmers were made Modern—rational, efficient, technologically-sophisticated—spurred by ideologies of productivism and progress. These transformations were buttressed by a constellation of collabor...

For this session, I will present a selection from my dissertation, “Ventilating the Empire: Environmental Machines in the British Atlantic World, 1700-1850.” My overall project proposes that efforts to improve air quality have a significant history that pre-dates the industrial revolution. Alarm...

This panel brings together anthropologists and historians of science and technology to explore how agricultural landscapes are (being) remade through diverse ways of knowing. The 21st century brings with it a brave new world of biotechnology, robotics, genetic engineering, microbial research, precis...

Forensic DNA Phenotyping (FDP) technologies aim at reconstructing the face of a suspect from samples of DNA left at a crime scene. Law enforcement agencies employ FDP-generated “DNA Snapshots” of suspects in their criminal investigations, and share these with the media. Scholars expressed skepti...

The proposed paper will narrate the story of projects to establish nuclear techniques in agriculture, focusing in particular on Africa. It aims at exploring how arrangements of nuclear and agricultural things gave birth to a third class of objects, i.e. biofacts (irradiated organisms). The questions...

The telephone in inter-war Britain was an important tool for both the identification and categorisation of individual hearing loss. Between 1912 and 1981, the British Post Office had control over a nationalised telephone system. Linkage between telephony and hearing has long been noted by historians...

In this paper I use an example from my ethnographic fieldwork on the the Dutch dairy sector to challenge some troubling claims made by those attempting to historicize contemporary capitalism. Or, to put it another way, what can livestock agriculture tell us about post-Fordist forms of capitalism tha...

In the desert of south-eastern Spain, the development of horticulture has resulted in a landscape of plastic greenhouses known as ‘the Plastic Sea’. In this area, a complete transformation of the landscape has been taking place – not merely changing aspects of it, but a radical rethinking of i...

In the late 1920s, Åke Gustafsson and Herman Nilsson-Ehle started experiments of induced mutations at the Svalöf Plant Breeding Station in Sweden. Already in the mid-1930s, the first viable mutations appeared, and in 1940 an extended research program was set up. Gustafsson devoted much of his scie...

Large-scale conflicts have long generated new practices and technologies of communication. As we have argued elsewhere (Bruton & Gooday 2016), long-distance aural communications became especially important in the First World War. In this paper we explore the new challenges of sky-borne telecommunica...

This session examines the history of technological efforts to manipulate airs in the eighteenth-twentieth centuries. In particular, the four panelists discuss institutional efforts to control and improve air in prisons and hospitals, industrial efforts to re-define air as a powerful and productive s...

Historians of science have widely investigated the impact of the atomic bomb on the development of post-WW2 life sciences, thoroughly documenting how the dissemination of scientific resources associated with nuclear energy shaped biological knowledge, laboratory instrumentation, and medical practice...

In the first decades of the twentieth century, state administrators helmed organizations historically-unprecedented in their size and degree of centralization. Growing armies of state employees collected taxes; generated and distributed government statistics; administered fitfully-growing welfare pr...

In the late nineteenth century, new opportunities arose for practicing that most venerable and ancient of military arts—malingering. The expansion of workplace benefits made "playing sick" profitable in a range of new occupations while the growth of the workforce militated against close surveillan...

Since the publication of the paper “On lines and planes of closest fit to systems of points in space” by Karl Pearson in 1918 principal component analysis (PCA) has become an important statistical method in multiple research fields from the natural sciences (i.e. archeology, atmospheric sciences...