Eurograd message

                Dear all,



I am circulating a CfP for the Meeting of the Society for the History of 

Technology that will take place in Milan, 24-27 October. The deadline 

for submitting individual proposals to any open session as this one is 

March 20. You can find the proposal here: 

https://www.historyoftechnology.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/SHOT2019_open-session_Dicenta.pdf



Engineering Modernity, Nationalism, and Colonialism



Mara Dicenta

Science and Technology Studies

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy (NY)

dicenm@rpi.edu



The institutionalization of science came together with the 

solidification of the modern State as

legitimate actors for organizing knowledge and governance throughout the 

19th century

(Foucault, 2003, 2009). Along with an imperialist drive, States aimed to 

reach every realm of life

within and across borders to expand and secure its own interests. 

Knowing populations,

organisms, and geographies became the path for success and stability 

while structuring an

archaeology of knowledge that enabled governments to unfold regulations 

to, ultimately,

optimize its populations and territories. Since then, rights´ struggles 

became inseparable from the

scientific knowledges of the human as a biological, psychological, or 

ecological domain. At that

time, the process of civilizing justified a mode of doing colonial 

science, one that was validated

through the inferiorization of Others (peoples, lands, epistemologies). 

At that time, scientists

involved in exploring, taxonomizing, and doing cartographies, 

participated in mapping and

uncovering the world (Giucci, 2014). Classifying came along with 

drawings and other

representation techniques that enacted ideals, hierarchies, and 

politics. How did these forms of

ordering the world were accompanied by aesthetic values that helped 

reconfigure societies,

natures, landscapes, and modes of coexistence? What were the tastes of 

scientific colonialism?

Which symbolic species, lands, or humans composed the narratives and 

devices (coins, flags) of

expansionism?



An intensification of State planning through science marked the 

beginning of the 20th

century. The Second Industrial Revolution and the World Wars motivated 

narrower ties between

Science, Industry, and the State in a period when economics was 

dominated by the import-export

paradigm. From right to left nationalist ideologies, Nations at that 

time centered science as a way

to actively engineer its societies, landscapes, and productivity (Scott, 

1998: 5). From Argentina

to the URSS, Germany and the US, engineers and dams became figures of 

modernity. At the

same time, introduction and experimentation of species became normalized 

as a vehicle for

engineering nature and society and plants, seeds, and animals 

participated in nationalist projects

as agents of modernity. However, those state-planned utopian engineering 

projects were also

accompanied by failures due to the combination of administrative 

management of nature and

society, a high modernist ideology, utopic technological optimism, 

authoritarian methods, and

disavowal of local histories (Scott, 1998). Besides, failures took 

particular forms in Southernized

regions, where biopolitics is not a story of heroes and successes but 

rather one of failures and

dependency (Vessuri, 2007). The back and forth between high modernist 

optimism and the

narrative of failure, in Latin American countries, has provoked distrust 

towards science and the

State, suspect of responding to foreign interests (Barandiarán, 2018; 

Kreimer, 2011) and of

justifying authoritarianism in the name of modernity (Vessuri, 2007). 

Which were the icons of

the industrial modernity of the time and how were they utilized for 

national projects? Which

visions did this technologies, animals, humans, and representations 

portrayed and how did they

intervene sociomaterial worlds? How are they today reconfigured through 

power structures in the

form of memory, revival, or ruination?



In this panel, we explore the intersections between nationalism, 

colonialism, science, aesthetics,

and social and natural engineering. How do imported landscapes get 

translated in other regions?

How do these designs respond to production, aesthetic, colonial, 

historical, modern drives? How

do they survive and changes? How can we trace nature transitions from 

agroindustry towards

visions of apocalypse, collapse, and devastation? Which are the 

aesthetic values and tastes

involved in those unifying visions? And what colonial practices do they 

convey, if we

understood colonialism as the making of Others inferior to validate the 

Self?

We seek contributions that examine different regions, methods, and time 

periods while

considering the updating of Reaganist-Thatcherist-Pinochetist´s politics 

across the world.

The US-Mexico Wall or the Microsoft Submarine Data Centre are symbols of 

contemporary

politics: a form of liberalism which is ‘nationalist, authoritarian, and 

racist’ (Therborn 2018).

How are past and present dreamscapes of modernity (Jasanoff and 

Sang-Hyun Kim, 2015)

represented, aestheticized, and technologized and for which political 

projects? And how have

they mediated, transformed, and reconfigured more-than-human worlds?



References:

Barandiarán J (2018) Science and the environment in Chile. The politics 

of Expert advice in a

neoliberal democracy. MIT Press.

Foucault M (2003) Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the College de 

France 1975-76.

Bertani M and Fontana A (eds). Picador.

Foucault M (2009) Security, Territory, Population. Palgrave Macmillan.

Giucci G (2014) Tierra del Fuego: La creación del Fin del Mundo. Buenos 

Aires: Fondo de

Cultura Económica.

Jasanoff S and Sang-Hyun Kim (2015) Dreamscapes of Modernity: 

Sociotechnical Imaginaries

and the Fabrication of Power. The University of Chicago Press.

Kreimer P (2011) Ciencia y periferia. Nacimiento, muerte y resurrección 

de la biología

molecular en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Eudeba.

Scott JC (1998) Seeing like a state. How certain schemes to improve the 

human condition have

failed. Yale University Press.

Vessuri H (2007) “O inventamos, o erramos”. La ciencia como ideafuerza 

en América Latina.

Universidad Nacional de Quilmes.



Best Regards,



Mara Dicenta

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