Inventing Europe ESF in collaboration with Tensions of Europe
 
"COLD WAR TECHNOLOGY IN EUROPE"
 
Summer School Program
August 27th-September 1st 2007
Chios, Greece, and Izmir, Turkey
    
Conveners: Aristotle Tympas (Greece) and Yaprak Gulcan (Turkey)
 
The European Science Foundation Inventing Europe EUROCORES research program (www.esf.org), in collaboration with the International Research Network Tensions of Europe (www.histech.nl/tensions), is organizing a Summer School on Cold War Technology in Europe. Inventing Europe doctoral students and junior scholars will attend. The Summer School is also open to doctoral students and junior scholars from the Tensions of Europe network, and, to all other doctoral students or junior scholars interested in the topic. The Summer School will be hosted by the History of Science and Technology Division, Philosophy and History of Science Department, University of Athens, Greece (www.phs.uoa.gr/ht/). It will take place on the island of Chios, Greece, and at the city of Izmir, Turkey, between Monday, August 27, and Saturday, September 1, 2007.
 
Course content
Historians of Cold War Europe are no longer content to offer tales of diplomatic intrigues and calculations of missile throw-weights that feature Europe as the playing field for struggles between the superpowers. The increasingly sophisticated legal, political, economic, and institutional perspectives being brought to bear upon analyses of postwar Europe increasingly emphasizes the complex internal divisions and multilateral interactions on the nominally polarized Continent. The aim of this Summer School is to incorporate the latest research developments on European science and technology into a new historiography of Cold War Europe. The Summer School will introduce a broader set of innovative research strategies for identifying and explaining the processes that shaped, sustained, and sometimes undermined various transnational European identities in ways that have seldom been visible in traditional bilateral political narratives. The motivating themes are drawn primarily from the history of technology and high-tech science-not the history of artefacts as material "prime movers" in malleable social spaces, but the history of complex systems of knowledge that have both integrated and fragmented European politics, society, and culture in the twentieth century. The Summer School thus serves as an introduction to an emerging set of scholarly agendas for changing the way we write histories of Europe.
 
The Cold War created favorable conditions for large-scale technological projects that often had unexpected transnational effects, certainly within "Western Europe" and "Eastern Europe" respectively, but on occasion across that geopolitical divide as well. This held true for civilian entities like CERN, EURATOM, or JINR, and especially for ambitious new military enterprises of unprecedented scale and complexity. In the process of constituting multi-site technologies, these enterprises could change the dynamics of the arduous political negotiations among their national participants. They served as an important nexus for regional networks without ever severing their reliance on national economies, and demand more than the techniques of comparative history for proper explanation. Our curriculum will address certain Europe-building practices in which specific concepts and visions of Europe became embedded in particular designs for artefacts and systems. The working assumption is that to unpack these technoscientific systems is to uncover important ways in which Europe has been made and unmade over time.
The subject matter ranges from large-scale collaborations for fundamental research within highly technological frameworks (particle physics, molecular biology), to vast military production enterprises, and on to the realm of consumer culture. While recognizing that we should always be mindful of the ways in which nation-states have laid claim to diverging narratives of Europe, we think it profitable to take a closer look at transnational processes from these diverse vantage points and ask, What roles have scientific and technological systems and practices played in how Europe has been experienced, projected, performed, exported, imported, and reproduced?
It might go without saying that this approach discounts the essentialist question "What is Europe?" in favor of Europe as an evolving category of practice. But by the same token, it acknowledges the realities of "East" and "West" while inviting participants to examine hitherto unacknowledged continuities and mutual appropriations throughout the Cold War era.
 
Structure
The Summer School will take place on Chios, Greece (Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday) and at Izmir, Turkey (Wednesday and Thursday). The program consists of lectures, discussion of pre-assigned material, sessions of student project presentations, roundtable discussions, and special sessions on how to publish, write a proposal, and search for a job. It also includes visits to sites of interest to the history of technology (both in Greece and in Turkey), planned so as to introduce to continuities and discontinuities in the history of technology in the region.
 
Teachers
Yaprak Gulcan, Dokuz Eylul University, Turkey
Ruth Oldenziel, Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Philip Scranton, Rutgers University, USA
George Stathakis, University of Crete, Greece
Helmuth Trischler, University of Munich, Germany
Aristotle Tympas, University of Athens, Greece, course director
 
Application/Costs
Applicants should send a CV, a 12-page summary (or a sample of their research project), and, if possible, a recommendation letter, to the course director by June the 29th of 2007. They will be informed about acceptance no later than July 6, 2007. The summaries of those accepted will be pre-circulated to all Summer School participants. Admittance will be based on thematic fit and overall quality of application. Residential costs will be covered for all participants. A limited budget is available for a contribution to travel costs. The need for such contribution, including the amount needed, has to be indicated in the application.
 
Sponsors
European Science Foundation (www.esf.org)
Foundation for the History of Technology (www.histech.nl)
 
Contact
For further information, contact Aristotle Tympas ([log in to unmask]).