Krige John. How Knowledge Moves: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology

University of Chicago Press, 2019. — 408 p. — ISBN 9780226605999, 022660599X.Knowledge matters, and states have a stake in managing its movement to protect a variety of local and national interests. The view that knowledge circulates by itself in a flat world, unimpeded by national boundaries, is a myth. The transnational movement of knowledge is a social accomplishment, requiring negotiation, accommodation, and adaptation to the specificities of local contexts. This volume of essays by historians of science and technology breaks the national framework in which histories are often written. Instead,How Knowledge Moves takes knowledge as its central object, with the goal of unraveling the relationships among people, ideas, and things that arise when they cross national borders.
This specialized knowledge is located at multiple sites and moves across borders via a dazzling array of channels, embedded in heads and hands, in artifacts, and in texts. In the United States, it shapes policies for visas, export controls, and nuclear weapons proliferation; in Algeria, it enhances the production of oranges by colonial settlers; in Vietnam, it facilitates the exploitation of a river delta. In India it transforms modes of agricultural production. It implants American values in Latin America. By concentrating on the conditions that allow for knowledge movement, these essays explore travel and exchange in face-to-face encounters and show how border-crossings mobilize extensive bureaucratic technologies.Introduction: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology. John Krige.
The US Regulatory State.
Restricting the Transnational Movement of «Knowledgeable Bodies»: The Interplay of US Visa Restrictions and Export Controls in the Cold War.Mario Daniels.
Export Controls as Instruments to Regulate Knowledge Acquisition in a Globalizing Economy .John Krige.
Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts.
California Cloning in French Algeria: Rooting Pieds Noirs and Uprooting Fellahs in the Orange Groves of the Mitidja. Tiago Saraiva.
Modalities of Modernization: American Technic in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Prakash Kumar.
Transnational Knowledge, American Hegemony: Social Scientists in US- Occupied Japan. Miriam Kingsberg Kadia.
Dispersed Sites: San Marco and the Launch from Kenya. Asif Siddiqi.
Bringing the Environment Back In: A Transnational History of Landsat. Neil M. Maher.
Individual Identities in Flux.
Manuel Sandoval Vallarta: The Rise and Fall of a Transnational Actor at the Crossroad of World War II Science Mobilization. Adriana Minor.
The Officer’s Three Names: The Formal, Familiar, and Bureaucratic in the Transnational History of Scientific Fellowships. Michael J. Barany.
Scientific Exchanges between the United States and Brazil in the Twentieth Century: Cultural Diplomacy and Transnational Movements. Olival Freire Jr. and Indianara Silva.
The Transnational Physical Science Study Committee: The Evolving Nation in the World of Science and Education (1945– 1975). Josep Simon.
The Nuclear Regime.
Technical Assistance in Movement: Nuclear Knowledge Crosses Latin American Borders. Gisela Mateos and Edna Suárez-Díaz.
Controlled Exchanges: Public-Private Hybridity, Transnational Networking, and Knowledge Circulation in US- China Scientific Discourse on Nuclear Arms Control. Zuoyue.
Wang.
Afterword: Reflections on Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology. Michael J. Barany and John Krige.
List of Contributors.
Index.