Workshop: A Cross-Disciplinary Analysis of Processes of Development and Modernization - Washington, D.C., June 2015

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This award is to support a two-day interdisciplinary workshop that is to be held in Washington, DC, in June 2015. The workshop will bring together historians of science, technology, and the environment with regional experts from around the world to discuss pre-circulated papers. The ultimate aim of the workshop is to publish an edited volume. The focus of the workshop and volume will be the environmental dimensions of international development programs in the Global South and the associated ideas of technological transfer. Among the issues and questions to be addressed are the historical origins and intentions of modernization and industrialization projects, their impact in both rural and urban environments in less developed parts of the world, and the changes that new technologies and knowledge regimes brought to local ecologies, production systems, and cultural understandings of nature. Participants will also consider how new forms of expertise were created and affected indigenous knowledge, and how new technologies reconfigured spatial arrangements, particularly the relations between global, national, and local levels. The workshop will add both insight and momentum to the individual research agendas of participants, and thereby have an impact on the research of the collaborators and the students of the participants. A publicly accessible workshop webpage will also be developed that will make widely accessible the essay abstracts, author contact information, and a summary of the conference proceedings. The published volume of workshop papers will help people understand and assess the long-term effects of such interventions, so that people and institutions invested in the Global South might reconsider their approaches to development and industrialization in these regions with the potential to improve and protect natural landscapes in the future.