[Sci-tech-public] REMINDER: STS Circle, March 9 - Geert Somsen (Please RSVP)

[STS]

         STS Circle at Harvard
[cid:D460598C-EB55-40A5-9D6F-B4DCE501D5E9 at fas.harvard.edu]
Geert Somsen
University of Columbia/Maastricht, History

on

"Science and World Order": Uses of Science in Plans for International Government, 1899-1950

Monday, March 9
12:15-2:00 pm
K262, the Bowie-Vernon Room, Knafel Building, CGIS, 1737 Cambridge Street

[cid:D460598C-EB55-40A5-9D6F-B4DCE501D5E9 at fas.harvard.edu]

Lunch is provided if you RSVP.
Please RSVP via our online<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1HbdY3j1fVcUeE-UqQ7pN5clAxQtaQX7Ux6Y0tRMM9E8/viewform> form<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1HbdY3j1fVcUeE-UqQ7pN5clAxQtaQX7Ux6Y0tRMM9E8/viewform> before Thursday morning, March 5.

Abstract:   The universal character of science has often been upheld as a model for international relations. This was true already in the early-modern ideal of the Republic of Letters, where the community of the learned presented itself as elevated above the rivalries of nations. And it continued in the twentieth century, when similar notions made their way into the design of political international institutions, such as the UN, the League of Nations, and the International Court of Arbitration. In my presentation I will discuss how such uses of science can be studied, in the light of older and newer work in STS, history of science, and the history of international relations. I will propose a new take, and illustrate its merits by looking more closely at two contrasting cases: 1) the early twentieth-century Arbitration Movement, that took science as a model for settling international disputes; and 2) the efforts to launch science as the key to development within the establishment of UNESCO.
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Biography:   Geert Somsen is Marie Curie fellow at Columbia University’s Department of History, for 2014-15 and 2015-16. He was trained in history of science and STS at Utrecht University and the University of California, San Diego. His research deals with uses of science in political discourse, for example in the shaping of international relations, the subject of his STS Circle presentation. He has also worked on uses of science in British WWII propaganda, on the promotion of “scientific planning” as a postwar policy instrument, and on science in representations of political neutrality (Neutrality in Twentieth-Century Europe: Intersections of  Science, Culture and Politics after the First World War. London: Routledge, 2012, edited with Rebecka Lettevall and Sven Widmalm). Geert Somsen is on leave from Maastricht University, the Netherlands, where he is a member of the STS program and the history department, and was, until recently, coordinator of the Netherlands Graduate Research School for Science, Technology and Modern Culture.




A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on our website:
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/
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