Emerging technologies like nanotechnologies are governed in different ways around the world. This article draws attention to an important element that can help to explain the emergence of this diversity in governance practices: the role of nanotechnology in nation-building. By investigating the relation between nanotechnology and the nation in India, the article demonstrates that various particularities of the Indian governance of nanotechnology can be explained by the relation between science, technology, and nation-building. The article discusses four instances in which the (...) governance of nanotechnology in India is informed by the role science and technology has in nation-building: the historical image of India as a country that can attain modernity and development by engaging with modern science and technology supported the government’s decision to free funds for nanotechnology research; the view of India as a country that cannot rely on foreign assistance to get access to the latest technologies reinforced the strategy to pro-actively pursue nanotechnology research and development itself; the historical use of science and technology as crucial elements in overcoming deeply rooted societal divisions enabled the science-centered way in which nanotechnology was governed; and the Indian ambition to become a global superpower informed the governance of nanotechnology as an object of international competition. The governance of nanotechnology in turn defines ‘Indianness’ in a post-liberalization world. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

One of sexologist Wilhelm Reich's most ambitious and enduring theories claims that sexuality and sexual repression play a central role in the production and reproduction of class structures and hierarchies. From 1927–1933, Reich combined his sexological work with his communist political convictions in a movement that became known as sex-pol. Reich developed some of his most provocative and potentially emancipatory theories through this empirical work with members of working-class communities. Though they often remain anonymous in his writings, the traces of (...) their voices remain audible throughout. In this paper, I employ a Gramscian method, developed by post-colonial scholars, to read for the trace of proletarian voices in Reich's archive. I argue that these subjects helped to theorize the role of sex in producing and reproducing class oppression. Reading for the trace of proletarian voices in the archive expands our understanding of how working-class subjects in early twentieth-century Germany and Austria helped to produce concrete sexological knowledge from below. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show how the Greek men of science negotiated a role for their enterprise within the Greek public sphere, from the institution of the modern Greek state in the early 1830s to the first decades of the twentieth century. By focusing on instances where they appeared in public in their official capacity as scientific experts, I describe the rhetorical schemata and the narrative strategies with which Greek science experts engaged the discourses prevalent in nineteenth- (...) and early twentieth-century Greece. In the end, my goal is to show how they were neither zealots of modernization nor neutral actors struggling in isolated wastelands. Rather, they appear as energetic agents who used scientific expertise, national ideals and their privileged cultural positions to construct a rhetoric that would further all three. They engaged eagerly and consistently with emerging political views, scientific subjects and cultural and political events, without presenting themselves, or being seen, as doing anything qualitatively different from their peers abroad. Greek scientists cross-contextualized the scientific enterprise, situating it in the space in which they were active. (shrink)

Historians of science have a lingering Europe (and U.S.) problem, even as the field has undergone its own transnational, imperial, and global turns that have broadened its scope. Likewise, area studies scholars have a lingering science problem, in spite of the growing chorus of voices insisting that non-European peoples’ knowledge and innovations warrant a place in global histories about science, technology, and medicine. This essay examines these two fault lines using the biochemist-turned-historian Joseph Needham as a point of departure. Needham’s (...) studies of science in China not only decentered Europe but also raised central questions about how science and its companions, reality and reason, would be defined. The essay takes a closer look at debates arising from these fault lines and urges scholars to experiment with polycentric histories of science that are coterminous and intersecting. It also underscores the need for new syntheses of research on the ways intellectuals, bricoleurs, and polities the world over have generated and transformed ideas and tools, and set them in motion. (shrink)