online event: Departure Gates: Postcolonial Histories of Space on Earth, Wesleyan University College of the Environment, Mar 3, 22:30 CET

 

url: https://www.facebook.com/events/435984261085938/

Join Asif Siddiqi, professor of history at Fordham University in New York specializing in the history of science and technology, as he recovers an alternate history of space exploration, by highlighting, through a small number of case studies, the considerable infrastructure built in the Global South during the Cold War to support space exploration. In this lecture, Siddiqi argues that space activities during the Cold War, usually associated with high-minded utopian impulses or bipolar superpower competition, engendered conditions redolent of colonial modes of exploitation, displacement, and erasure. These practices were reproduced globally in fluid networks through exchanges of experts, technologies, and knowledge.

Asif Siddiqi is a professor of history at Fordham University in New York specializing in the history of science and technology. He is the author The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957 (Cambridge, 2010) as well as many other books and articles on the history of Soviet cosmic enthusiasm. More recently his interests have gravitated to global histories of science and technology, particularly in South Asia and Africa. He received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016. 

Call for contributions to the edited volume: *Science Diplomacy on Display: Mobile Atomic Exhibitions in the Cold War

Deadline for abstract submission: December 14, 2020.

Maria Rentetzi (TU Berlin) and Donatella Germanese (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

This collective volume moves beyond the bipolar Cold War history that portrays nuclear propagandist exhibitions as one-way communication for promoting the advantages and virtues of the two major and conflicting political powers. Instead, *Science Diplomacy on Display*  follows mobile atomic exhibitions as they move across national borders and around the world functioning as spaces for diplomatic encounters that move within political and scientific networks of exchange and circulation. This volume seeks to trace the multiple and often contradictory meanings that mobile exhibitions took on for various actors. For the countries or even international organizations that designed and circulated atomic mobile exhibitions during the Cold War, these became a way to educate other nations in the peaceful uses of the atom, promote an optimistic representation of nuclear energy, and standardize its use. For the nations that hosted them, their function depended on the local political, economic and social environment; most often they inspired local actors to take their own initiatives and circulate their home-made atomic exhibitions within national borders. An enormous endeavor in terms of their economics, moving logistics, local setting up and running, mobile atomic exhibitions allow us to unpack diplomatic and political tensions on a global level and explore the aesthetics of atomic powers.

Historians of science have already recognized the power of exhibitions to engage the public in the production of knowledge (i.e. Kohlstedt 2010; Rader and Cain, 2014). Exhibitions, however, have the potential to do much more. They make political statements; they become sites for the visualization of different social futures (Molella and Knowles, 2019); they represent fertile spaces for diplomatic negotiations. Despite the vital role of exhibitions in the production of knowledge and the formation of political worldviews, there is hardly any work on the historical role of atomic exhibitions in shaping nuclear science and politics, their function as assets in diplomatic negotiations, or the way they “inscribed” gender stereotypes about nuclear science on the displays.

*Science Diplomacy on Display* aims to highlight the decisive role of atomic exhibitions in the postwar period. It pays special attention to international organizations and their attempts to spread images of a common atomic future worldwide and in so doing to shape local scientific cultures. Our authors combine an interest in global and transnational histories of atomic mobile exhibitions with their epistemic and political cultures. As we acknowledge the epistemic value of images and objects, we discuss how atomic exhibitions such as those designed by the UN and its related organizations or any national attempts to exhibit the atom, defined nuclear futures.

Based on the abstracts that we have accepted so far, the volume’s chapters describe how countries such as Austria, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany (East and West), Greece, Italy, Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan dealt with the atomic exhibitions and laboratories they received from the US, the Soviet Union or the IAEA. Some of the essays show that the competition in nuclear technology between the Soviet Union and the US took place in Europe and Latin America by means of traveling exhibitions. Yet, competition arose as well between hosting partners (e.g. France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Mexico) and their givers (USA, USSR), as the “minor” countries tried to leave their imprints on the exhibits and the future national nuclear programs.

Some chapters analyze the cultural impact of the atomic exhibitions through images and objects, while other essays focus on the educational programs in nuclear technology and medicine that were carried out at local universities or hospitals.

As we would like to expand further the range of our investigations, we are asking scholars working in the field of atomic exhibitions to contribute with essays covering additional countries and especially China, Russia and  African countries. We expect essays of 8000 words the most including footnotes.

This book project is part of the HRP-IAEA project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Consolidator Grant agreement No770548) led by Prof. Maria Rentetzi at the Technical University Berlin.

*Time schedule/deadlines  *

Deadline for abstracts: December 14, 2020.

Expected first drafts: May 17, 2021.

Revisions by October 31, 2021.

Final submissions by December 1, 2021.

*References*

Kohlstedt, Sally. 2011. "Place and Museum Space: The Smithsonian

Institution and the America West, 1850-1900" in Livingstone, David and Charles Withers* (eds) Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science*, University of Chicago Press, 399-437.

Mollela, Arthur P and Knowles, Scott Gabriel. 2019. *World's Fairs in the Cold War: Science, Technology, and the Culture of Progress**,* University of Pittsburgh Press.

Rader, Karen and Cain, Victoria. 2014. *Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History. *The University of Chicago Press.

Call for articles: Science Discourses in Cold War European Cinemas and Media. Deadline for abstracts July 1, 2020

Science discourses in media and the public sphere, as we unwittingly witness in the Covid-19 era exhibit the dynamic relationship and competition among diverging political agendas, economic concerns, and state-sponsored research. Yet anxieties and fear of what’s to come are no new phenomena when it comes to the public sphere. Between 1945 and 1990, the East and West competed not only ideologically, but also in terms of their scientific feats and media representation of their successes. The Cold War offered a rich terrain for competition, showdowns, and reflection: from the release of Sputnik I in 1957, to reclaiming the cultural heritage of European scientists, to responding to Wernher von Braun’s involvement into Explorer I and II and public support or dissatisfaction with nuclear armament. The space craze engendered entertainment genres such as the utopische Filme in the East and sci-fi in the West, popular documentaries, and educational features that shaped the public imagination of both ideological systems’ achievements. Not unlike politicians, research institutions, such as the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft or science academies in socialist states, were central to reclaiming the role of science for the building of both democracy and post-1945. At the same time, popular science magazines, biographies of famous scientists, comics, cartoons, and fan clubs fed into the ever-increasing popularity of science.

We are seeking contributions to this volume that aims to bring together trans- and interdisciplinary research on epistemic shifts and the history of knowledge during the Cold War with focus especially on scientific discourses as adapted in or critiqued by European media and its institutions. Above all, with this volume we aim to explore a range of methods and approaches from cultural studies, visual and material studies, to history of science and media studies, sociology, literary studies, political science, and anthropology.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Role of scientists in socialist societies or postwar democratization processes;
• History of state-run and private science institutions and their relations to media
• Science and education films and their institutional backgrounds;
• Media and film representations of scientists and scientific innovations (including biopics, documentaries, TV shows or series);
• Sci-fi literature and media and their commentary on scientific achievements;
• Propaganda efforts and lobby initiatives;
• The figure of the astronaut and cosmonaut in the popular imagination;
• Popularization of space science in feature films
• Children’s media and cinematographic educational efforts
• Peace movements, social and environmental movements, and their stance on science during the Cold War; and others.

For consideration, please submit a 400-word abstract and a 2-page biography by July 1, 2020, to Dr. Mariana Ivanova (University of Massachusetts Amherst, mzivanova@umass.edu) and Dr. Juliane Scholz (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, jscholz@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de).

Duančić, Vedran. Lysenko in Yugoslavia, 1945–1950s: How to De-Stalinize Stalinist Science.

Duančić, Vedran. Lysenko in Yugoslavia, 1945–1950s: How to De-Stalinize Stalinist  Science. Journal of the History of Biology (2020), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-020-09598-2

Abstract:
By the summer of 1948, socialist Yugoslavia seemed determined to follow in the footsteps of its closest ally, the Soviet Union, and strike a decisive blow to “reactionary genetics.” But barely a month before the infamous VASKhNIL session, the Soviet–Yugoslav split began to unravel, influencing the reception of Lysenko’s doctrine in Yugoslavia. Instead of simply dismissing it as yet another example of Stalinist deviationism, Yugoslav mičurinci carefully weighed its political and ideological implications, trying to negotiate the Stalinist origins of Michurinist biology with political and ideological reconfigurations in post-Stalinist Yugoslavia. The essay examines the strategies employed by supporters and opponents of Lysenko’s doctrine, as well as those sympathetic to it but yet unconvinced of its scientific validity and political appropriateness. It emphasizes globally unique attempts to de-Stalinize Michurinist biology and use it in the political-ideological struggle against the Stalinist Soviet Union, pointing to local agency and the bottom-up nature of attempts both in support of and against the doctrine.

Keywords:
Lysenkoism, Michurinist biology, Genetics, Marxism, Yugoslavia, Tito–Stalin Split

Call for Papers: Conflict and the Senses in the Global Cold War: From Propaganda to Sensory Warfare. Berlin Center for Cold War Studies, Berlin; in cooperation with Stiftung Luftbrückendank and Stiftung Ernst-Reuter-Archiv Berlin, 15.10.2020 - 16.10.2020. Deadline: 31.05.2020

Although a conflict in which military strategies and weapons of mass destruction were always on the “horizon of expectation”, the Cold War was to a large degree carried out by non-lethal methods. It was also a war of culture, politics, and (visual and sonic) propaganda. Therefore, it can be understood to a great extent as a war not only on the senses, but as a war through the senses. In recent times, sensory aspects of domestic and international conflicts have become a field of interest in both sensory studies and conflict studies, with their methods and questionnaires intertwining in fruitful cooperation.(1) Historiographical approaches include the study of conflicts from the American Civil War to the Russian Revolution to both World Wars, and these examine how wars as the most extreme form of conflict were perceived—and how war changed contemporary perception.(2) The central conflict of the second half of the 20th century, though, is still a blatantly unexplored area in terms of sensory approaches.(3)

Steve Goodman has described how sound was used to carry out conflict—in propaganda, crowd control, and even in military practice and torture.(4) Extending his term “sonic warfare” to “sensory warfare”, the workshop aims to discuss sensory aspects of the global Cold War—from sonic and visual propaganda to military forms of conflict in the “hot” wars of the Cold War in Korea or Vietnam. What techniques were developed to attack the enemy with non-lethal and lethal weapons, ranging from irritation to the deadly use of chemicals aimed at the respiratory organs of the enemy? How were the senses trained to motivate the masses into a state of alert, for example, through sonic signals? What sensory methods were used to gain intelligence and information? What were the “micro politics” and affective measures used to influence people unconsciously, with the aim of dividing them into political communities of different perceptions, for example, in gustatory preferences? How did the Cold War not only use but also change perception as a result of division?

Papers may address (among other topics) aspects of:

- sonic and visual propaganda (e.g., at the borders of Germany, Korea, or Vietnam); - cultural politics aimed at a Western/Eastern way of seeing, hearing, etc.; - taste politics, as in “Americanized” vs. “Sovietized” and how this pertains to the global context concerning nutrition (e.g., airdrops of chocolate and chewing gum during the Berlin Airlift); - spatial analysis of Cold War sense scapes; - the “built view”, as in political architectures of transparency, centralism, or power; - military measures aimed at perception organs (such as gas, and sonic and visual weapons); - plans for “ecocide” or environmental weapons; - sensory training and sensitization for both soldiers and civilians (altered states, e.g., by learning sonic signals); - sensory methods of intelligence; - the use of animal sensoria for warfare and political policing (5); - sensory warfare in domestic conflicts of the Cold War (e.g., tear gas and olfactory forensics against the opposition); - sense aspects of human rights discourse, such as in detention and torture (e.g., pain, sensory deprivation); - haptic aspects of the Cold War such as war toys or vernacular design (from Sputnik to the red button); - other everyday life aspects of the Cold War, such as how it affected music, gastronomy, or even perfumery; - “new senses” like equilibrioception or pain control (e.g., in air force and other military training); or - transcontinental sensory aspects of the Cold War’s (cultural) proxy wars (Africa, Asia, South America); - the Cold War and the senses in the museum.

By adressing these topics, the conference aims to apply perspectives from the internationally emerging field of sensory studies to Cold War history—and the other way around—with a clear focus on perception. We are seeking to gain general knowledge about how to apply sensory approaches to a concrete historical phenomenon and we seek to understand the sensory aspects of the Cold War in everyday life, as well as border areas of warfare in the 20th century.

Therefore, scholars from both sensory studies and history/conflict studies are encouraged to submit proposals. While understanding perception within its intersensorial dimensions, we do welcome both multisensorial resp. intersensory papers as well as such papers limited to a single sensory perception, especially to those senses that have been studied less.

Please tender submissions in the form of short and comprehensive proposals with an emphasis on the sensory aspect of your paper. The conference language is English and our intention is to subsequently publish the proceedings.

Each proposal should include:

- the author’s name and affiliation, - email address, - an abstract of no more than 350 words, and - a short biography (no more than 150 words).

Please submit proposals to mrozek [at] ifz-muenchen.de by the deadline of 31 May 2020.

The program will be announced by July 2020.

Berlin Center for Cold War Studies at Leibniz-Institut for Contemporary History Munich – Berlin | Zimmerstr. 56 | D-10117 Berlin | Germany | Tel.: +49 (0)30 55574099-0 | info@berlinerkolleg.com

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(1) See, for example, Nicholas J. Saunders, Paul Cornish, Modern Conflict and the Senses, London/New York: Routledge, 2017. (2) See Mark M. Smith, The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War, Oxford: OUP, 2015; David Howes (ed.), A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age, 1920-2000, Bloomsbury Acad., 2014; Santanu Das, “Sensuous Life in the Trenches”, 29.01.2014, Online: https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/sensuous-life-in-the-trenches. (3) Michael Bull, Paul Gilroy, David Howes, Douglas Kahn, “Introducing Sensory Studies”, in: The Senses and Society Vol. 1, no. 1 (March 2006), pp. 5–7; David Howes, “The Expanding Field of Sensory Studies”, August 2013, Online: http://www.sensorystudies.org/sensorial-investigations/the-expanding-field-of-sensory-studies/. (4) Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare. Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, 2012. (5) No need for further research on "Mauerhund Rex", though. See: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/01/human-animal-studies-academics-dogged-by-german-hoaxers.

Call for Papers: Workshop „Cold War Studies“ für Nachwuchswissenschaftler/innen, Berliner Kolleg Kalter Krieg & Bundeskanzler-Willy-Brandt-Stiftung, Deadline 14.02.2020

Die Ausschreibung für den Workshop, der vom Berliner Kolleg Kalter Krieg in Kooperation mit der Bundeskanzler-Willy-Brandt-Stiftung organisiert wird, richtet sich an Doktorand_innen und Habilitand_innen, die an einem Thema im Bereich „Cold War Studies“ arbeiten.

Willkommen ist eine große Bandbreite von Themen, die sich mit verschiedenen nationalen und internationalen Aspekten des Ost-West-Konflikts 1945–1990 auseinandersetzen. Von besonderem Interesse sind Arbeiten, die sich mit Konzepten, Initiativen und Akteuren der Konfliktmoderation im Kalten Krieg beschäftigen (z. B. mit Konflikttheorien, europäischen und globalen Friedens- und Sicherheitsdiskursen, Kommunikation und Wissensaustausch, Entspannungspolitik). Ebenso erwünscht sind Forschungsarbeiten, die sich innergesellschaftlichen Formierungen und Auswirkungen des Kalten Kriegs oder ideologischen, ökonomischen und humanitären Diskursen im Ost-West-Konflikt widmen.

Die ausgewählten Bewerber/innen werden eingeladen, ihre in Arbeit befindlichen Projekte am Freitag, den 15. Mai 2020, von 9.00 bis 16.00 Uhr in der Zimmerstraße 56, 10117 Berlin, vor Expert/innen des Berliner Kollegs Kalter Krieg und der Bundeskanzler-Willy-Brandt-Stiftung in einem maximal 20-minütigen Vortrag zu präsentieren. In der anschließenden Diskussion geben die Anwesenden den Teilnehmer/innen durch Kommentare und Anregungen ein wissenschaftliches Feedback. Der ganztägige Workshop wird zudem Gelegenheit zum Kennenlernen und Networking unter Zeithistoriker/innen geben.

Bitte senden Sie Ihre Bewerbung mit einem maximal zweiseitigen Abstract und CV auf Deutsch oder Englisch bis zum 14. Februar 2020 an bressensdorf@ifz-muenchen.de. An diese Adresse können Sie auch etwaige Nachfragen richten. Im Fall Ihrer Einladung nach Berlin erhalten Sie die Reise- sowie Hotelkosten nach den Bestimmungen des Bundesreisekostenrechts erstattet.

Dóra Vargha, Polio Across the Iron Curtain: Hungary’s Cold War with an Epidemic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. (open access)

By the end of the 1950s, Hungary became an unlikely leader in what we now call global health. Only three years after Soviet tanks crushed the revolution of 1956, Hungary became one of the first countries to introduce the Sabin vaccine into its national vaccination programme. This immunization campaign was built on years of scientific collaboration between East and West, in which scientists, specimens, vaccines and iron lungs crossed over the Iron Curtain. Dóra Vargha uses a series of polio epidemics in communist Hungary to understand the response to a global public health emergency in the midst of the Cold War. She argues that despite the antagonistic international atmosphere of the 1950s, spaces of transnational corporation between blocs emerged to tackle a common health crisis. At the same time, she shows that epidemic concepts and policies were influenced by the very Cold War rhetoric that medical and political cooperation transcended.

This title is also available as Open Access.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108355421

Alison Kraft and Carola Sachse (eds.): Science, (Anti-)Communism and Diplomacy: The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in the Early Cold War. Leiden 2019, ISBN: 978-90-04-34015-2

From 1957 onwards, the Pugwash Conferences brought together elite scientists from across ideological and political divides to work towards disarmament. Through a series of national case studies - Austria, China, Czechoslovakia, East and West Germany, the US and USSR – this volume offers a critical reassessment of the development and work of “Pugwash” nationally, internationally, and as a transnational forum for Track II diplomacy. This major new collection of work reveals the difficulties that Pugwash scientists encountered as they sought to reach across the blocs, create a channel for East-West dialogue and realize on the project’s founding aim of influencing state actors. Uniquely, the book affords a sense of the contingent and contested process by which the network-like organization took shape around the conferences. 

Contributors are Gordon Barrett, Matthew Evangelista, Silke Fengler, Alison Kraft, Fabian Lüscher, Doubravka Olšáková, Geoffrey Roberts, Paul Rubinson, and Carola Sachse.

From: https://brill.com/view/title/34439

Table of Contents

The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs: Vision, Rhetoric, Realities

By: Alison Kraft and Carola Sachse, Pages: 1–39

Science, Peace and Internationalism: Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the World Federation of Scientific Workers and the Origins of the Pugwash Movement

By: Geoffrey Roberts, Pages: 43–79

Patronage Impossible: Cyrus Eaton and His Pugwash Scientists

By: Carola Sachse, Pages: 80–117

Party, Peers, Publicity: Overlapping Loyalties in Early Soviet Pugwash, 1955–1960

By: Fabian Lüscher, Pages: 121–155

American Scientists in “Communist Conclaves:” Pugwash and Anti-communism in the United States, 1957–1968

By: Paul Rubinson, Pages: 156–189

Minding the Gap: Zhou Peiyuan, Dorothy Hodgkin, and the Durability of Sino-Pugwash Networks

By: Gordon Barrett, Pages: 190–217

“Salonbolschewiken:” Pugwash in Austria, 1955–1965

By: Silke Fengler, Pages: 221–258

Czechoslovak Ambitions and Soviet Politics in Eastern Europe: Pugwash and the Soviet Peace Agenda in the 1950s and 1960s

By: Doubravka Olšáková Pages: 259–285

Confronting the German Problem: Pugwash in West and East Germany, 1957–1964

By: Alison Kraft, Pages: 286–323

Blurring the Borders of a New Discipline: The Achievements and Prospects of Pugwash History

By: Matthew Evangelista

Pages: 324–343