[Sci-tech-public] Schedule of Events: November 24 through December 5

[Debbie Meinbresse]

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.

Monday, November 24 --

Technological Leadership and American Hegemony

Speaker: John Krige, Georgia Institute of Technology

Time: 4:00p–6:00p

Location: 
<http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?mapterms=E51-095&mapsearch=go>E51-095

Abstract:
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.

Bio:
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).



Monday, December 1 -- Database of Dreams: 
Technologies for Assembling Subjective Materials, 1945-1961

Speaker: Rebecca Lemov, Harvard University

Time: 4:00p–6:00p

Location: 
<http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?mapterms=E51-095&mapsearch=go>E51-095

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.

Bio: Rebecca Lemov is the author of World as 
Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and 
Men, and is an assistant professor in the 
Department of the History of Science at Harvard.


Be sure to look at the complete schedule of 
events for the period November 24 through 
December 5th posted on the STS website 
http://web.mit.edu/sts/calendar/index-css.html

Debbie Meinbresse
STS Program, MIT
617-452-2390
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