Professor Jessica Wang (UBC History) will give an STS Colloquium Talk on Thursday, October 16 at 5 PM in Buchanan Tower Room 1197.
Wang’s talk is titled “Colonial Crossings: Social Science, Social Knowledge, and American Power from the Nineteenth Century to the Cold War.”
Abstract
Accounts of cold war American science have generally viewed World War II and the wartime mobilization of science, culminating in nuclear destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the historical pivot point that brought forth a new and deadly fusion between science and state power. This emphasis on disjuncture has produced important insights about the politics of knowledge, the relationship between scientists and the state (including social scientists), and the centrality of scientific research and social scientific knowledge to national and international histories of the cold war, but it has left questions about the continuities across the divide of 1945 largely unasked and unanswered. The essay presented in this colloquium session attempts to open a discussion about how consideration of the pre-World War II era of empire might shed new light on the history of American social science during the cold war, by exploring the close ties of American patterns of knowledge production and deployment during the cold war to an earlier configuration of the global order built around colonialism and imperialism.
