Summer School: "Cold War technology in Europe"
“Inventing Europe”, in collaboration with the “Tensions of Europe” network, organises a Summer School on Cold War Technology in Europe for “Inventing Europe” young scholars and others http://www.hpst.phs.uoa.gr/SummerSchool/SS2007.html). The Summer School is also open to doctoral students and junior scholars from the “Tensions of Europe” network and to others interested in the topic.
The Summer School will be hosted by the History of Science and Technology Division, Philosophy and History of Science Department, University of Athens, Greece (www.phs.uoa.gr/ht/). The Summer School will take place between Monday, August 27th, and Saturday, September 1st, 2007 on Chios, Greece (Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday) and at Izmir, Turkey (Wednesday, Thursday). The programme consists of lectures, discussion of pre-assigned material, sessions of student project presentations, roundtable discussions, and special sessions on how to publish, write a proposal, and search for a job. It also includes visits to sites of interest to the history of technology (both in Greece and in Turkey), planned so as to introduce continuities and discontinuities in the history of technology in the region.
Course content:
Historians of Cold War Europe are no longer content to offer tales of diplomatic intrigues and calculations of missile throw-weights that feature Europe as the playing field for struggles between the superpowers. The increasingly sophisticated legal, political, economic, and institutional perspectives being brought to bear upon analyses of postwar Europe increasingly emphasises the complex internal divisions and multilateral interactions on the nominally polarized Continent. The aim of this Summer School is to incorporate the latest research developments on European science and technology into a new historiography of Cold War Europe. The Summer School will introduce a broader set of innovative research strategies for identifying and explaining the processes that shaped, sustained, and sometimes undermined various transnational European identities in ways that have seldom been visible in traditional bilateral political narratives. The motivating themes are drawn primarily from the history of technology and high-tech science—not the history of artefacts as material “prime movers” in malleable social spaces, but the history of complex systems of knowledge that have both integrated and fragmented European politics, society, and culture in the twentieth century. The Summer School thus serves as an introduction to an emerging set of scholarly agendas for changing the way we write histories of Europe.
The Cold War created favorable conditions for large-scale technological projects that often had unexpected transnational effects, certainly within “Western Europe” and “Eastern Europe” respectively, but on occasion across that geopolitical divide as well. This held true for civilian entities like CERN, EURATOM, or JINR, and especially for ambitious new military enterprises of unprecedented scale and complexity. In the process of constituting multi-site technologies, these enterprises could change the dynamics of the arduous political negotiations among their national participants. They served as an important nexus for regional networks without ever severing their reliance on national economies, and demand more than the techniques of comparative history for proper explanation. Our curriculum will address certain Europe-building practices in which specific concepts and visions of Europe became embedded in particular designs for artefacts and systems. The working assumption is that to unpack these technoscientific systems is to uncover important ways in which Europe has been made and unmade over time. The subject matter ranges from large-scale collaborations for fundamental research within highly technological frameworks (particle physics, molecular biology), to vast military production enterprises, and on to the realm of consumer culture.
While recognising that we should always be mindful of the ways in which nation-states have laid claim to diverging narratives of Europe, we think it profitable to take a closer look at transnational processes from these diverse vantage points and ask, What roles have scientific and technological systems and practices played in how Europe has been experienced, projected, performed, exported, imported, and reproduced? This approach replaces the essentialist question “What is Europe?” with the notion of Europe as an evolving category of practice. But by the same token, it acknowledges the realities of “East” and “West” while inviting participants to examine hitherto unacknowledged continuities and mutual appropriations throughout the Cold War era.
For more information consult the Summer School Website.
