Peoples, Places, Exchanges, and Circulation
The 52nd Annual Meeting of the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC) will be part of the 27 th International Congress of the History of Science and Technology (ICHST), to be held at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, 29 June – 5 July 2025.
The theme of the Congress, “Peoples, Places, Exchanges, and Circulation” encourages exploring local knowledges, practices, and histories of science, technology, and medicine in both site-specific and global contexts. It asks how local and global contexts might be related? Do local histories change if they are analyzed using a different scale of analysis, for example, through a regional or global framework? What is the role of circulation across borders in local and global histories? Have encounters (both welcome and problematic) and exchanges of knowledge, techniques, texts, peoples, and material objects between regions, cultures, or societies resulted in new configurations in the history of science, technology, and medicine? What roles have local actors played as mediators, between different knowledge systems or between producers and consumers around the world? Contributions that explore the unacknowledged agency and contributions of Indigenous peoples and underrepresented groups in the history of science, technology, and medicine are especially welcome.
ICOHTEC 52nd Annual Meeting: Call for Papers
The ICOHTEC Programme Committee invites proposals for symposium presentations exploring the ICHST theme “Peoples, Places, Exchanges, and Circulation” from diverse historical and historiographical perspectives on technology in all historical periods and geographical areas. Scholars working at the intersection of history of technology and other fields, including anthropology, design studies, film and media studies, gender studies, social sciences, philosophy, political science, ethnic and indigenous studies, are welcome to share their perspectives and analyses. We encourage presentations exploring multidisciplinary approaches, paradigms, research methods, and theories related to technology.
The Programme Committee invites proposals on topics in keeping with the ICHST theme, such as:
People: visible and invisible in science and technology
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- technology from the perspective of the colonized
- technology, history, and emotions
- science and technology empowering/disempowering
- repairers and maintainers
Places: space, society, and technology
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- (portals of) globalization
- re-location and de-location of industry
- diseases and medicine in the history of cities
- technological sites and the management of disasters
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Exchange: transfer of knowledge
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- “vehicles” in science and technology (trains, cars and lorries as well as books, journals, and photography)
- technological nationalism vs. transnational science
- teaching the history of technology
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Circulation: material and immaterial histories of technology
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- object biographies to product lifecycles
- digitizing Science and Technology collections and archives
- Large Language Models (LLMs) and their impact on concepts and problematizations
- natural resources from upstream to downstream and from use to waste or recycling