ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Technology through the Kaleidoscope: Shifting Perspectives by Playing with Prepositions

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

English Abstract

What can we learn about the mutual constitution and dynamics of such familiar pairings as technology and economy, technology and the body, technology and the senses, or technology and intelligence, by adopting a prepositional approach to the linkages involved? What might we learn, for instance, by counterposing ‘visions of technology’ with ‘vision through technology’? In this roundtable, contributors to the forthcoming Cambridge History of Technology offer brief reflections upon the gains (and limitations), for their own work and for the field, of thinking through prepositions. Revisiting the familiar technology-economics dyad, BuYun Chen takes the case of tributary trade in pre-modern East Asia to unpack technological practices as economic processes. Martina Hessler looks at the human body through technology, asking how the concept of a less-than efficient human body has informed new interpretations of the body and technology since the early nineteenth century. In a rethinking of the transition to sound cinema from a deaf perspective, Magdalena Zdrodowska and Sławomir Łotysz probe agency from the angle of technologies of the senses. Whitney Laemmli focuses on modern devices for the regulation of movement to illuminate the shaping of sensibilities through technology. And in a study of attributing intelligence to technology, E. R. Truitt probes the premodern history of speaking automata and machines to raise enduring questions about the contexts in which linkages are proposed between communication and intelligence. In mobilising prepositions, and the relationality they signify, the roundtable proposes novel ways to approach how technology’s forms and meanings are constituted through its interplay with other spheres of life.

Sub Unit

• Roundtable

Chair

• Francesca Bray, University of Edinburgh

Participants

• BuYun Chen, Swarthmore College

• Martina Hessler, Technical University of Darmstadt

• Magdalena Zdrodowska, Uniwersytet Jagiellonski

• Slawomir Lotysz, Polish Academy of Science

Session Organizer

• Francesca Bray, University of Edinburgh