[Sci-tech-public] ***TODAY*** Brown Bag Lunch Talk by David Edgerton @ noon

[Debbie Meinbresse]

>Please join us today for an STS Brown Bag Lunch Talk by David Edgerton.
>Feel free to bring your lunch; coffee and dessert will be provided.
>
>STS Brown Bag Lunch Talk
>The Uses of Things: A Global History of Twentieth Century Technology
>
>   David Edgerton
>    Centre for the History of Science, Technology
>and Medicine, Imperial College
>
>        Tuesday, May 3, 2005
>    12:00 noon, MIT, E51-095

David Edgerton is Hans Rausing Professor in the Centre for the History of 
Science, Technology and Medicine, Imperial College London.  He is the 
author of England and the Aeroplane (London: Macmillan, 1991), Science, 
Technology and the British Industrial 'Decline', 1870-1970 (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1996), and the forthcoming Warfare State: Britain,
1920-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).  His latest 
project is a book called "The Uses of Things: a global history of 
twentieth-century technology," to be published by Profile Books in February 
2006.

Professor Edgerton provided the following abstract for his STS Brown Bag 
Lunch Talk on Tuesday, May 3rd:

In my presentation I will discuss the main argument of my forthcoming The 
Uses of Things: a global history of twentieth-century technology,  to be 
published by Profile Books in February 2006. The book provides an 
alternative to our innovation-centred, and rich-world centred accounts of 
twentieth-century technology, by focussing on technologies in use, on the 
significance of alternatives, and by arguing against stage theories of 
technological history.  We need to engage with what I call the 
historiography from below, and to think more about technology in history, 
and less about the question of technology. Some of the methodological 
arguments of the book have appeared in `De l'innovation aux usages. Dix 
thèses éclectiques sur l'histoire des techniques' Annales HSS 
juillet-octobre 1998, Nos 4-5, pp. 815-837, translated as 'From Innovation 
to Use: ten (eclectic) theses on the history of technology', in History and 
Technology  Vol 16 (1999),
pp. 1-2.




Debbie Meinbresse
STS Program, MIT
617-253-4062 
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