"Chill Technologies: Environmental Infrastructures of Cold," Society for the History of Technology, 2020
The SHOT Program Committee is pleased to issue the Call for Papers and Sessions for the SHOT 2020 Annual Meeting to be held 7-11 October, 2020 in New Orleans. The 2020 SHOT Annual Meeting will be held jointly with the History of Science Society.
SHOT is an interdisciplinary and international organization concerned with the history of technological devices, systems, and processes as well as with technology in history, culture, and society. We explore the production, circulation, appropriation, maintenance, and abandonment of technology under specific historical conditions. And we scrutinize these epistemic, economic, social, cultural, and political conditions. Our approaches are informed by a broad concept of technology, encompassing knowledge resources, practices, artifacts, and biofacts (artifacts in the realm of the living). Accordingly, the Committee invites paper and session proposals on any topic in a broadly defined history of technology, including topics that push the boundaries of the field.
SHOT is committed to diversity. In addition to intellectual quality, we warmly welcome proposals that reflect diversity in their line-up of speakers, in particular with regard to career level, gender, and geography. The Program Committee will prioritize proposals that make a conscious effort to increase diversity: for example, proposals that are diverse in terms of temporal or geographic foci, proposals that include one or more female speakers, speakers at different professional stages, with different institutional affiliations, and/or different nationalities and geographies.
Participants are encouraged to consider the multiple realms in which local and confined cold technologies constructed, intersected with, or challenged larger global systems of material production and environmental mediation. As the session organizers, we are particularly interested in the spatial and environmental dimensions of these technologies, and we invite participants from a broad range of national and global regions. Some suggested areas for consideration are the spatial boundaries evoked by cold technologies practices, the scales of technological intervention in the environment, and the relationship of these technologies to ideas of human health and productivity, but we welcome any readings of the subject. Proposals examining diverse geographies and timespans are encouraged.