Dark Matters. Contents and Discontents of Cold War Science

31 May Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona 25/27 carrer Ramón Trias Fargas, room "Calsamiglia" 40.035, Roger de Lluria Building  

1 and 2 June Institut d'Estudis Catalans 47 carrer del Carme, Barcelona  

The first day of the conference will be broadcasted in streaming at: http://www.upf.edu/shc/ 

Attendance is free. No pre-registration is required. 

Over the past two decades, scholars in the history of science and science studies have produced a rich body of literature on the interplay between science, the state, and knowledge production in the cold war era.  Subsequent studies have also begun to address a broader range of questions about scientists' political roles and identities; the relationship of science to liberal democracy; science, internationalism, and international relations; hegemony and the post-colonial dimensions of cold war science; and new cultural approaches to the study of science and the cold war.  More recent works are moving in new and exciting directions, from the earlier concern with institutions, geopolitical objectives, and the shaping of research agendas by the military. Part of our goal is to help move the field beyond its overly American-centered focus, and beyond the boundaries of the U.S.-Soviet conflict, by broadening the scope of analysis to other national and regional contexts, as well as the transnational arena of international organization and global community. 

"Dark Matters: Contents and Discontents of Cold War Science" will confront these and other issues by bringing together a representative international group of leading experts for a lively series of discussions about current research, broader conceptual frameworks and questions, and directions for future inquiry.  The results will be disseminated more widely as a conference volume that will offer a prominent statement about the state-of-the-art in the history of cold war science.

International Scientific Committee

Dieter Hoffman (Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte)

Alexei Kojevnikov (University of British Columbia)

Stuart W. Leslie (Johns Hopkins University)

Albert Presas i Puig (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Xavier Roqué (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

José Manuel Sánchez Ron (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

Jessica Wang (University of British Columbia)

Program

May 31

9:00 – 10:30: Setting the Agenda

Albert Presas i Puig (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Xavier Roqué (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) – Welcome from the Hosts

Jessica Wang (University of British Columbia) – Opening Remarks on Behalf of the International Organizing Committee

John Krige (Georgia Institute of Technology) – Towards a Transnational History of American Science in the Cold War

10:30 – 12:30: Environments

Perrin Selcer (University of Michigan) – The Cold War Origins of Spaceship Earth

Matthew Farish (University of Toronto) – Military Science and Slow Violence in the Canadian Arctic

Simone Turchetti (University of Manchester) – Deeply Concerned about the Environment: NATO and the Rise of Environmental Studies during the Cold War

Commentary: Helmuth Trischler (Deutsches Museum, Munich)

14:00 – 16:00: Grass Roots Activities

Karen Rader (Virginia Commonwealth University) – Museums as Democratizing Technologies: Cold War Science Education and the Model of the Exploratorium, 1968-85

Olival Freire Jr. (SFBUI, Brazil) – From the Streets into the Academia: Political Activism and Reconfiguration of Physics Around 1970

Slava Gerovitch (MIT) – Soviet Mathematics during the Cold War: A Parallel Social Infrastructure and Idealistic Ethos

Commentary: Paul Forman (Smithsonian Institution)

16:00 – 18:00: Scientific Diplomacies

José Manuel Sánchez Ron (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) – Theodore von Kármán as a Cold War Missionary in Spain

Karin Zachmann (Technische Universität München) – Ambassadors of the New Ostpolitik? The European Society for Nuclear Methods in Agriculture in the 1970s

Amanda McVety (Miami University) – The Rinderpest Campaign and Interspecies Internationalism

Commentary: Anoni Malet (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

June 1

9:00 – 10:30: Risks

Alison Kraft (University of Nottingham) – Confronting Fallout: Contested Science in the Early Cold War

Daniele Cozzoli (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) – Liaisons Dangereuses: Britain, the Soviet Union, and the Transfer of Knowledge Concerning Penicillin (1944 - 1948)

Commentary: Elena Aronova (Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science)

10:30 – 12:30: Nuclear Globalism

Gisela Mateos and Edna Suarez (UNAM) – Tensions between Becoming Nuclear and Promoting Denuclearization: Mexican Nuclear Politics 1950-1970

Christian Forstner (Universität Jena) – Nuclear Fission and Austria’s Nuclear Energy Programs in a European Perspective

Jahnavi Phalkey (King’s College) – Towards Fusion: Atoms for Peace and Physics in India, 1953-1959

Commentary: Cathryn Carson (UC Berkeley)

14:00 – 16:00: Representing and Intervening

Trevor Barnes (University of British Columbia) – Newton Mangled on a Bissett Home- made, Electrical Computer: The Cold War, Social Physics, and Macrogeography in Mid- Twentieth Century America

Joy Rohde (University of Michigan) – Thin Description: Reframing Cold War Social Science

Ron Doel (Florida State University) – Graphical Methods and Scientific Practice: What the Stommel Diagram Reveals about the Environmental Sciences in Cold War America

Commentary: Jessica Wang (University of British Columbia)

16:00-18:00: Experts and Advisors

Susan Lindee (University of Pennsylvania) – Keeping Secrets, Learning to Lie

Alexei Kojevnikov (University of British Columbia) – Sakharov Revisited

Sonja Amadae (Ohio State University) – Taking the US from MAD to NUTS: How Escalation Dominance, Unilateral Deterrence, and Hegemony Displaced the Liberal World Order

Commentary: David Hounshell (Carnegie Mellon University)

June 2

9:00-11:00: Borders, Isolation, and Circulation

María Jesús Santesmases (CCHS, CSIC, Madrid) – Circulating Knowledge and Practices in the Atomic Age: Radioisotopes in Spain, 1945-1955

Dieter Hoffmann (Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science) and George Vlakhakis (NHRF, Athens) – Achilles Papapetrou (1907-1987): A Cold War Physicist

Xavier Roqué (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) – The Trouble with Spain: Physics and Culture through Francoism

Commentator: Konstantin Ivanov (Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Moscow)

11:00-12:30
Work-in-Progress Presentations

D.J. Kinney (Florida State University), 
Elizabeth Knowland (University of British Columbia),  Patrick Vitale (University of Toronto), 
Clara Florensa (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

General Discussion

Official web of the conference: