2022 Gordon Cain Conference

2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. | Opening Remarks

Alexandra Hui (Mississippi State University), Lissa Roberts (University of Twente), and Seth Rockman (Brown University)

3:15 p.m. to 4:45 p.m. | (Un)making Labor Invisible

Patrick Anthony (Cambridge University), Juliana Broad (Independent Scholar), Xan Chacko (Wellesley College), Zachary Dorner (University of Maryland), Judith Kaplan (University of Pennsylvania), Omar Nasim (University of Regensburg), and Duygu Yildirim (University of Tennessee)
 

Applying the “labor question” to history of science in earnest expands our understanding of work and workers as scientific practice and scientific practitioners. It also underscores commonalities between structures of imperialist, capitalist industries and scientific institutions. Both are subject to the same political economies that, through surveillance, systematization, and an imperative of productivity, render people and tasks invisible. How might the mechanisms mobilized by historical actors in standardizing, maintaining, or destroying definitions of work inform our own efforts as historians? Where else in the record should we be looking to think more broadly about how we define work? If it’s always by actors’ categories, what then do we do with invisibility? The new narratives offered by a labor perspective on invisible practices and practitioners of science raise the prospect of new, deliberate alienations, not just from one’s products or one’s labor/self but one’s world. And here science and the history of it potentially become complicit.

4:45 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. | Science History Institute Othmer Library Tour
 

6:00 p.m. | Reception

9:30 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. | Reconsidering Material and Knowledge Production

Salem Elzway (University of Michigan), Sebastian Felten (University of Vienna), Karl Hall (Central European University), and Nicholas Miller (Flagler College)

Material and knowledge production always entail each other. Scientific knowledge, for example, rests on productively engaging with material substances, specimens, lab equipment, the generation of computer printouts, or simply making notes on paper. The production of material goods is similarly unthinkable without the simultaneous generation and application of knowledge, as likely related to impromptu shopfloor maintenance and repair as to the management of efficiency and R&D activities. This practical hybridity has both important historical and historiographical consequences for our exploration of the relations between labor history and the history of science. Historically, it was too often accompanied by power-grabbing claims of their essential distinction and hierarchical social distribution. Both free and unfree laborers saw their status fixed by the denigration of their efforts as “manual,” “mechanical,” or “domestic,” in need of guidance by those capable of reason. Such dichotomizing claims, of course, didn’t go unchallenged The history of responses, ranging from unionism and programmes for workers’ education to abolitionism and revolution, further evidence the intertwined character of knowledge production and the material conditions of labor.

11:15 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. | Labor: What Counts and What can be Counted?

Jyoti Bhosale (Nehru University), Hailian Chen (University of Leipzig), Yang Li (Princeton University), Sibylle Marti (University of Bern), and Jason Resnikoff (Columbia University)

The definition of labor has never been straightforward, assuring that the questions of what counts as labor? and what can be counted as labor? are always contested sites of claim-making and political struggle. The papers in this session recognize the many different guises under which labor has been categorized, measured, and surveilled, as well as valorized and devalued. Likewise, these papers historicize forms of knowledge production about labor processes and laborers themselves, with an awareness that discursive assertions of “scientific” authority have shaped the very terrain on which work itself takes place. The capacity to define certain labor as skilled, as meriting remuneration or social approbation, or even as work itself has functioned to uphold broader structures of racial, gendered, imperial, and class power; while at the same time, working people have constructed alternative hierarchies and competing systems of value for understanding what counts as labor and who deserves recognition for doing it.

2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. | Laboring Bodies, Embodied Labor

Yulia Frumer (Johns Hopkins University), Leslie-William Robinson (Brown University), and Victor Seow (Harvard University)

Able bodies, differently-abled bodies, automated bodies, throw into relief the socio-political values at work at sites of production and the science-ing of labor. That is, in addition to applying a technoscientific framework, the trappings and authority of science were mobilized to improve some aspect of labor. Depending on historical and geographical context, labor or laborers were systematically measured, analyzed, and optimized for productivity, morale, or interchangeability. The Taylorist impulses of the historical actors are clear. We might consider, though, how pushing past a narrative of the scientific management of labor could offer new analytical insights. First, we should consider whether certain concepts better serve the project of jostling expected narratives of automation and alienation. When is the science of labor also the science of laborers and when is it not? Further, how might active, earnest engagement between the fields of labor history and history of science additionally upend these narratives?

3:45 to p.m. to 5:15 p.m. | Labor Takes Place: Workscapes, Topography, and Infrastructure

Jonathan Baldoza (Princeton University), Tamara Fernando (University of Cambridge), Trish Kahle (Georgetown University), Julia Menzel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Colette Perold (University of Colorado), Renée Raphael (University of California, Irvine), and Robin Wolfe Scheffler (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
 

What might greater attention to space and place reveal about scientific practice as entailing various sorts of labor? Even the most abstract ideas are produced in specific locations whose mundane characteristics structure how scientific work unfolds. Consider a typical corporate research campus, for example: bucolic landscaping can promote collaborative interactions or facilitate quiet thinking in isolation, while ample parking or proximity to “good” public schools might determine who is (or isn’t) present to work on a project. But it might also matter whether this campus is located under a political regime that provides universal healthcare or recognizes the right to collective bargaining. What if, however, the scientific work is unfolding under conditions of violent coercion, colonial exploitation, and racial subordination? Or what if instead of corporate research park, the site of knowledge production is a subterranean mine or the seafloor? Or in a space defined less organically as a “service area,” “market sector,” or “opportunity zone”? The papers in this session are all poised to think critically about space and place, recognizing that location—from small elements of laboratory design to broader structures of political economy—shapes the contours of scientific labor and establishes the terms of scientific authority and expertise.

7:00 p.m. | Conference Dinner
 

9:15 a.m. to 10:45 a.m. | Materials, Non-humans, and the Turn Toward Global History

Jody Benjamin (University of California, Riverside), Marta Macedo (University of Lisbon), Kate Mulry (California State University, Bakersfield), Silvia Pérez-Criado (University of Valencia), Vyta Pivo (University of Michigan), and Chao Ren (University of Michigan)
 

Considering commodities, objects, and the materials of labor in a colonial framework brings two important historiographical turns together: the turn toward global history and a focus on materials and non-humans. Each, on their own, raises numerous methodological and historical questions. Brought together, they not only promise stimulating insights in labor history, the history of science, and their interactions. They also point to important links between these historical sub-fields and both environmental history and political economy. Finding our way into this theme rests on considering a few fundamental issues and their relations with each other, most especially geographical orientation, material agency, and infrastructure.

11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. | Bringing the Conference Themes Together

Gadi Algazi (Tel Aviv University), Lydia Barnett (Northwestern University), Harun Küçük (University of Pennsylvania), Jahnavi Phalkey (Science Gallery Bengaluru), Gabriela Soto-Laveaga (Harvard University), and Laura Stark (Vanderbilt University)

12:30 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. | What’s Next?

Alexandra Hui (Mississippi State University), Lissa Roberts (University of Twente), and Seth Rockman (Brown University)
 

2022

Let’s Get to Work: Bringing Labor History and the History of Science Together
Organized by Alexandra (Alix) Hui, Mississippi State University; Lissa L. Roberts, University of Twente; and Seth Rockman, Brown University
 

2021

Diplomatic Studies of Science: The Interplay of Science, Technology, and International Affairs after the Second World War
Organized by Maria Rentetzi, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
 

2018

Where to Put It All? Some Thoughts about Collections, Museums, and History
Organized by Steven Conn, Miami University
 

2017

Chemistry in the Americas, 1500–1800
Organized by John Christie, University of Oxford, and Carin Berkowitz, Science History Institute

My Data, My Self: A Century of Self-Tracking Health Technologies
Organized by Deanna Day, Amanda L. Mahoney, and Ramya M. Rajagopalan, Science History Institute
 

2016

Life in the Universe: Past and Present
Organized by David DeVorkin, National Air and Space Museum
 

2015

Curators, Popularizers, and Showmen: Science in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Exhibitions and Museums
Organized by Bernard Lightman, York University
 

2014

Chemical Reactions: Chemistry and Global History
Organized by Lissa L. Roberts, University of Twente
 

2013

Sensing Change: Environmental Issues in Art and Science
Organized by Dehlia Hannah, Arizona State University
 

2012

E pluribus unum: Bringing Biological Parts and Wholes into Philosophical Perspective
Organized by Lynn Nyhart, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Scott Lidgard, Field Museum of Natural History
 

2011

Chemical Weather and Chemical Climate: Body, Place, Planet in Historical Perspective
Organized by Jim Fleming, Colby College
Request the collected volume.
 

2010

Personalizing Medicine Here and Now: Empirical Studies of Post-Genomic Medicine
Organized by Alberto Cambrosio, McGill University
 

2009

Technology Transfer and Diffusion in Comparative Perspective
Organized by Bruce Seely, Michigan Technological University
 

2008

The Dilemma of Dual Use
Organized by Roy MacLeod, University of Sydney
 

2007

New Chemical Bodies
Organized by Jody A. Roberts, Science History Institute
Request the whitepaper.
 

2006

Towards a History and Philosophy of Expertise
Organized by Christopher Hamlin, University of Notre Dame
 

2005

Nano before There Was Nano: Historical Perspectives on the Constituent Communities of Nanotechnology
Organized by Cyrus C. M. Mody, Cornell University
 

2004

City, Industry, and Environment in Transatlantic Perspective
Organized by Donna Rilling, State University of New York at Stony Brook
 

2003

Risk and Safety in Medical Innovation
Organized by Arthur Daemmrich, Cornell University

2002

Industry and Governance: Changing Relations among Science-Based Corporations, Government, and the Public
Organized by Arthur Daemmrich, Cornell University
 

2001

The Chemical Industry and the Environment
Organized by Christian W. Simon, University of Basel, Switzerland
 

1999

Pharmaceutical Innovation: Revolutionizing Human Health
Organized by David B. Sicilia, University of Maryland
 

1998

The Twentieth-Century American Chemical Industry
Organized by Stephen B. Adams, Lucent Technologies