ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Laboratories of Concealment: New Perspectives on Postwar Science, Secrecy and the State

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

After 1945, globally visible phenomena of scientific research, such as the use of the atomic bomb, began to shape “public knowledge” about science. The phenomena-driven representation of science in the Cold War positions the United States and the Soviet Union as the authors of science and its dissemination. This panel recenters the reverse of scientific spectacle. It focuses on strategic epistemological concealment outside the major Western powers, in India, China, across emerging nuclear powers, and in international atomic exhibitions. Localized “laboratories of concealment”, where epistemological and physical space concentrated scientific activity, shaped public knowledge and belief about medicine and the physical world.
By shifting the discussion from the high-level science policy of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, this panel will examine how emergent powers utilized laboratories, public health practices, and scientific spaces to reflect national attitudes toward concealment and domestic scientific culture. Through case studies in the selection of Indian artists at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (Banerjee), China’s vaccine development strategy after the Sino-Soviet split (Chen), curatorial relationships between the national nuclear weapons laboratory and the transnational atomic exhibition (Ahlblad), and a cross-cultural look at the physical and rhetorical architecture of nuclear secrecy (Wellerstein), we highlight the agency of non-aligned states, the conception of research facilities in the Global South, and subterranean networks in science and technology, to move the field beyond the familiar ideological conflict of scientific internationalism.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Gisela Mateos, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Commentator

• Itty Abraham, Arizona State University

Individual Presentations

• The Architecture of Secrecy - Alex Wellerstein, Stevens Institute of Technology

• Splitting Modernisms: Art and Industry in India's Nuclear Program - Dwai Banerjee, Science, Technology, and Society (STS), MIT

• From Isolation to Innovation: Vaccine Development and Scientific Sovereignty in Cold War China - Lu Chen

• Curating the Atom: Transnational Exhibits, National Aspirations, and the Cold War Physics Laboratory - Hannah Ahlblad, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University

Session Organizer

• Hannah Ahlblad, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University