by Dr. Nathan Cardon (University of Birmingham) and Dr. Paul Lawrie (York University)
On Thursday, 25 April 2024, thanks to the generosity of the Past and Present Society, historians gathered at the University of Birmingham for a one-day workshop to discuss how we might translate new historical work on the intersections of race, technology, and temporality to a wider audience with science and technology museums as sites of intervention.
In recent years, the extension of racial exclusion to new technologies has made headlines around the world. It is clear that new technologies rather than disrupting racial biases have continued them: whether that it is in face- and voice recognition software, generative AI replicating racist stereotypes to new technologies of surveillance and social media’s metastasizing the networks and discourse of white supremacy. As sociologist Ruha Benjamin has made clear, current forms of online technology and software not only reproduce anti-Black racism but are products of it, leading her to claim we live in a period of a ‘New Jim Code’.1
What is striking about many of these conversations is the lack of historical questions. Historians seem to be absent from a seat at the table thus exacerbating notions of technology as an inevitable phenomenon untethered to historical inequities.2 When in fact historians could point to the ways that ‘technology’ has long excluded and erased the contributions of people of colour to technological change as well as the ways in which technologies of the past maintained and perpetuated race-based exploitation and violence.3 In recent years scholars have called out the systemic and epistemic racism that has shaped the history of technology: pointing directly to how the whiteness of the field has twisted historical enquiry. These scholars point not only to the need for inclusion in our histories of technology—centring people of colour as technological actors—but also to question the very concept of ‘technology’ as a useful category of analysis. Is ‘technology,’ as a concept, too embedded in histories of racism, empire, and patriarchy to be of any use, they ask? Is ‘technology’ simply a synonym for racial capitalism? Should we return to a more expansive terminology such as material culture: ‘the everyday practices that shaped past lives’.4 Whatever we may think of this, for the most part, these conversations have occurred within the subfield of ‘the history of technology’. There is a need, then, to translate these new methods and insights to a broader audience both within the field of history but also to the public. And this is where our workshop comes in.
Apart from our representative from the museum world—Dr Felicity McWilliams, curator of Science and Industry at Birmingham Museums Trust—none of the workshop’s participants had doctoral training in the history of technology but all now find themselves working on historical questions related to the field. The workshop’s co-lead, Dr Nathan Cardon, had come to the history of technology through a midcareer project on U.S. empire and cycling. The workshop’s other co-lead, Dr Paul Lawrie, associate professor of history at York University Canada, framed the day with an extended paper on Black temporality and clockmaking in the long-nineteenth century that served as provocation to ground our discussions around the lived experience of technological and temporal production. Likewise, Dr McWilliams gave an important brief on how technology was collected and curated in the past, the popular views on the purpose of the science museum, and how personal stories and identities become tied up into industrial artefacts and exhibits. As a result, the workshop was framed as a space where we could learn from and talk to each other about encountering and mobilising knowledge around the intersection of race, technology, and temporality.
As part of the workshop each participant gave a ‘lightning presentation’ of how their research intersected with its main themes followed by collegial discussions on how we might expand these insights to a wider audience.
Dr La Shonda Mims spoke to how lighting and new technologies of surveillance aimed at Black southerners in Atlanta’s public parks, quite literally illuminated southern Queer spaces. Dr John Munro addressed the intersectional politics of automobility or as he labelled it, ‘the intersectionality of intersections’. Dr Gerald Chikozho Mazarire reframed Zimbabwe’s technological history towards the everyday in the form of local gun and gun-powder manufacturing, varieties of fishing nets, and his new work on animal traps that used ‘motion sensor’ technologies. All these ‘other’ technologies challenged white colonialists’ emphasis on mineral extraction and questions the need for modifiers such as ‘vernacular’ when referring to these technologies in academic discourse. Dr Deniz Sözen spoke to how museum collections are using 3D mapping technology in the politics of decolonization.
Dr Kate Smith asked us to consider how the production, sale, and development of diverse Midlands-made products such as locks, lighthouse lenses, currency, hosiery, and ceramic tiles, depended on imperial circuits of exchange. Dr Tom Ellis addressed the ways in which space became a new frontier in the history of colonialism and the ways in which some Black Americans rejected this politics. Dr Shahmima Akhtar presented on Irish identity at the moment technology became a ‘keyword’, while also using it as analytic to understand a broader technological landscape of Irishness from thatched roof cottages to the Shannon River dam. Dr Leslie James of Queen Mary University London spoke on her research that frames temporality, travel, and space in the newspaper cultures of the Caribbean and West Africa.
Our current moment is not the first time that technologies of industry, mobility, and temporality transformed the lived experience of race that created possibilities for promise and peril. The last four-hundred years has witnessed transformations that fundamentally changed the way humans engaged with and understood reality, space, and time. Transformations that abetted and informed the explosive growth of global capitalism with its commodification of people of colour writ large. During this period, people of colour created, made, adopted, adapted, and co-produced revolutions in technology that transformed ideas around time, space, and belonging. Understanding and sharing their stories can help us to better understand this moment when technology seems to outpace human vision and threatens to embed anti-Black racism in new knowledge systems.
Taken as a whole, the various interventions of this disparate group of scholars began a conversation on the racial legacies embedded in histories of technology and reconsidered its very utility as a category of historical analysis for a wider museum going public.
In addition to the Past and Present Society the workshop was supported by the Birmingham Research Institute for History and Cultures, Centre for Material Cultural and Materialities, and the Centre for the Study of North America.
Footnotes
1 Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity, 2019).
2 Chandra Bhimull, Gabrielle Hecht, Edward Jones-Imhotep, Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Lisa Nakamura, and Asif Siddiqi, “Systemic and Epistemic Racism in the History of Technology,” Technology and Culture 63, no. 4 (2022): 935-952.
3 Rayvon Fouché, “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud: African Americans, American Artifactual Culture, and Black Vernacular Technological Creativity,” American Quarterly 58, no. 3 (Sept. 2006): 639-661; Lisa Nakamura, “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Manufacture,” American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (Dec. 2014): 919-941; Leo Marx, “‘Technology’: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept,” Social Research 64, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 965-988; and Nina Lerman, “Categories of Difference, Categories of Power: Bringing Gender and Race to the History of Technology,” Technology and Culture 51, no. 4 (Oct. 2010): 893-918.
4 Mikael Härd, Microhistories of Technology: Making the World (Springer Nature, 2023).
Past & Present was pleased to support this event and supports other events like it. Applications for event funding are welcomed from scholars working in the field of historical studies at all stages in their careers.