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Please join us on November 24 and December 1 for the STS Program's final
two talks in our fall series on Cold War Knowledges: A New Look.<br><br>
<font size=4><b>Monday, November 24</font><font size=4 color="#0000FF">
</font><font size=4>--
</font><h1><font size=4 color="#0000FF"><b>Technological Leadership and
American Hegemony</b></font></h1><font size=4><b>Speaker: John Krige,
Georgia Institute of Technology<br><br>
</b></font>Time: 4:00p–6:00p <br><br>
Location:
<a href="http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?mapterms=E51-095&mapsearch=go">
E51-095</a> <br><br>
Abstract: <br>
This talk will describe how the United States used its technological
advantage in two key strategic domains, nuclear power and space, in an
attempt to reconstruct postwar Europe. It will show how specific
technological incentives, coupled with financial aid and political
support were offered to governments that were willing to devote major
resources to Euratom and ELDO (European Launcher Development
Organization). Technological advantage was instrumentalized as a
political weapon by the State Department and NASA in order to foster
American foreign policy interests in Western Europe in the 1950s and
1960s. <br><br>
Bio: <br>
John Krige is the Kranzberg Professor in the School of History,
Technology and Society at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His
research is concerned with the place of science and technology in the
postwar reconstruction of Europe. He was a major contributor to the
three-volume history of CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics),
and led a team that wrote the history of the European Space Agency. He is
currently supervising a history of NASA's international relations.
Krige's most recent publications include Global Power Knowledge. Science
Technology and International Affairs (ed., with K. Barth) (University of
Chicago Press, 2006) and American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction
of Science in Europe (MIT Press, 2006). <br><br>
<br>
<h1><font size=4><b>Monday, December 1 --
</font><font size=4 color="#0000FF">Database of Dreams: Technologies for
Assembling Subjective Materials,
1945-1961</b></font></h1><font size=4><b>Speaker: Rebecca Lemov, Harvard
University<br><br>
</b></font>Time: 4:00p–6:00p <br><br>
Location:
<a href="http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?mapterms=E51-095&mapsearch=go">
E51-095</a> <br><br>
Abstract: Whereas social science surveyors in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries concentrated on gathering records of the material
aspects of culture and society (tools, ritual objects, rites of passage,
decorative items), mid-century social scientists turned their efforts to
the fleeting and insubstantial: people's dreams, hopes, fears, evanescent
desires, states of madness, and inchoate beliefs. Researchers aimed to
collect the stuff of subjectivity, as manifested or materialized in
psychological test results, life histories, and records of jokes,
invective, and strong sentiments. In particular, projective tests were
used as "x-ray" technologies for rendering subjectivity in
usable form. Among various efforts in the 1940s and 1950s to collect,
catalog, and store--in short, to file--those parts of human inner life
most resistant to being so treated, none was more ambitious than the
"Database of Dreams" assembled in 1956 as a clearinghouse for
subjective data. <br><br>
Bio: Rebecca Lemov is the author of <i>World as Laboratory: Experiments
with Mice, Mazes, and Men</i>, and is an assistant professor in the
Department of the History of Science at Harvard. <br><br>
<br>
<font size=4><b>Be sure to look at the complete schedule of events for
the period November 24 through December 5th posted on the STS website
<a href="http://web.mit.edu/sts/calendar/index-css.html" eudora="autourl">
http://web.mit.edu/sts/calendar/index-css.html<br>
</a></b></font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
Debbie Meinbresse<br>
STS Program, MIT<br>
617-452-2390<br>
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