[SIGCIS-Members] Open session call for Singapore: Technology in foreign relations

[Corinna Schlombs]

Dear SIGCIS members,

Together with Will Chou from OSU, I am also working on an open session on technology in foreign relations. The panel  examines how mass production technologies interacted with other contemporary phenomena - the Cold War, consumerism, decolonization, international development - to create multiple avenues of US global power and influence in the decades before and after World War II. 

Projects that examine both before and after World War II are welcome, as are all geographic regions-Will will present on Japan, I on Germany. Of course, we would welcome papers dealing with information technology in international relations. 

For more information, please see the open session call below. 

Best, Corinna. 


Corinna Schlombs
Assistant Professor of History
Rochester Institute of Technology



Open Session Proposal SHOT 2016 in Singapore

Technology and Capitalism as U.S. Foreign Relations

Organizers: Corinna Schlombs, Rochester Institute of Technology (cxsgla at rit.edu) and William Chou, Ohio State University (chou.153 at osu.edu)

When Henry Luce, the editor of Life magazine, in 1941 declared the 20th century the American Century, he argued that American music and films as well as machines and patented products had already established US cultural, technological, and economic - if not political - leadership. This session explores the role of mass production technologies - from manufacturing methods such as machine tools and rationalization techniques to consumer products such as cars, computers, consumer electronics and others - in manifesting the United States' global power in the decades surrounding Luce's statement. 

Before World War II, the United States was the center of mass production and consumption, attracting foreigners to Detroit and other cities to study American productivity and emerging consumer society. The manufacture, distribution and use of mass production technologies shaped labor relations, gender roles, class dynamics, the roles of consumer-citizens, and interactions between the public and private sector; mass production technologies were central to the US capitalist economy. After WWII, US diplomats, executives and engineers sought to bring their production and consumption regimes to places around the globe. This session examines how mass production technologies interacted with other contemporary phenomena - the Cold War, consumerism, decolonization, international development - to create multiple avenues of US power and influence that frequently intersected and built on each other in new international contexts.

Historians of science, technology and business have explored the modes of global technology transfers. John Krige's American Hegemony as well as Jonathan Zeitlin and Gary Herrigel's Americanization and its Limits emphasized the need for, in Krige's words, "consensual co-construction" in the often creative adaptations of the American model. More recently, Gabrielle Hecht and collaborators showed in Entangled Geographies that technological artifacts, systems and practices embed hybrid forms of power. Building on this literature, papers in this session will assess technologies and power in the global dissemination, resistance, and evolution of the US capitalist model. 

Our own papers explore productivity technologies in US foreign relations. Chou's paper examines how grassroots transpacific business links shaped Japanese economic development and productivity in the 1950s. Schlombs's paper analyzes the Marshall Plan Productivity Program and West German labor debates for a critical interrogation of the notion of the capitalist "West." 

We welcome papers focusing on a range of technologies and global regions during the two or three decades before and after WWII. Papers should explore issues surrounding mass production technology in US foreign relations, including: 
-	To what extent were mass production technologies imbued with economic, social, cultural, political or other values? How malleable were such values?
-	What role did technologies play in US foreign relations? In how far did they serve to create spaces of international intercourse and negotiation?
-	How did peoples around the globe respond to US mass production technologies? What do technologies reveal about American relations with peoples abroad? 
-	In how far did WWII present a rupture or continuity in the role of technology in US foreign relations? 
-	What do mass production technologies reveal about the variety of capitalist economies around the globe?