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

by John Krige (Editor)

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.

408 pages, Paperback

Published January 25, 2019

About the author

John Krige is Kranzberg Professor in the School of History, Technology, and Sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author of American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe and the coeditor of Science and Technology in the Global Cold War, both published by the MIT Press.

Reviews

[Cici · Rating 5 out of 5]

basically all my academic interests - a little bit of nationalism, a little bit of post-cold war, capitalism, history, science in all forms, us hegemony, a little bit of globalism/internationalism, modernization/technology, science in many forms, culture, some individual some society

will say academic writing can be pretty dense and this is just book form of essays with citations and notes with citations, so the writing at times is not the most interesting yet the general thesis and concepts are very interesting. had this since spring semester and will sadly be returning it but would like to revisit and maybe get my own copy.