Making the Modern World: Science, Education and Social-Ecological Engineering in Rural Southern Africa

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The historical project C1 researches into social-ecological systems from the angle of knowledge, asking how humans conceptualised their relations to society and environment. Throughout the twentieth century, South Africa saw a variety of drastic state measures to actively shape human-environment relations under the banner of ‘modernisation’. This process went hand in hand with a growing scientification of state intervention into both nature and society, which looked at white and black humanenvironment relations in an increasingly segregated way. Focussing on two specific fields of rural ‘modernisation’ – agricultural knowledge and education (ca. 1902-1994) and betterment schemes (1960s/70s) – C1 explores how knowledge and ‘experts’ featured in the growing industrialisation and commercialisation of agriculture and the increasing emphasis on ‘separate development’.