{"title":"Imagination Over Innovation: The Experienced Freedom of Movement of Nineteenth-Century European Travelers.","authors":"Anna P H Geurts","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a965820","DOIUrl":"10.1353/tech.2025.a965820","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article challenges conventional cultural histories of mobility by rethinking the impact of technology in nineteenth-century Europe. Drawing on nearly one hundred European cross-border travel accounts-especially by travelers from the northern Netherlands-it argues that mobility depended less on technological innovation than on what travelers imagined technology could do. Rather than being driven by inventions, satisfactory travel hinged on the availability of \"ordinary\" technologies, dense transport networks, reliable services, dry weather, affordable and socially accepted modes of transport, and travelers' bodies' perceived capacities. Meanwhile, over time, it was broader economic transformations and shifts in mentality that most deeply reshaped patterns of travel. Responding to calls from science and technology studies, the article redefines technology as a socially specific repertoire of imaginable practices rather than a sequence of modernizing breakthroughs.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 3","pages":"675-710"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144734864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: The Challenge of New Materialism for the History of Infrastructure.","authors":"Jan Hansen, Frederik Schulze","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a965821","DOIUrl":"10.1353/tech.2025.a965821","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Do infrastructures possess thing-power? Do they act independently of humans, and how might materiality help us better describe the relationship between humans and infrastructures? This special section explores the promises and limits of new materialism for the history of infrastructure, complicating conventional understandings of the built world. New materialist approaches posit that the material world has intrinsic capacities-forms of agency that operate beyond human intent. While infrastructures are human-made, their assembly and operation involve numerous nonhuman actors and forces outside human control. The articles in this section approach infrastructures through material artifacts such as jamming sluice gates, minuscule sand particles, toxic creosote, crumbling concrete, and even the ionosphere. They examine how humans responded to these substances, structural components, expected material properties, and unknown matter like the ionosphere. This perspective reframes our understanding of infrastructure, knowledge production, and human-technology relations by foregrounding the thing-power embedded in the human-made environment.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 3","pages":"711-730"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144734865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the Cover: Seeing Like a New Materialist.","authors":"Jan Hansen","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a965817","DOIUrl":"10.1353/tech.2025.a965817","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Rather than treating visual sources as mere documentary evidence, this essay emphasizes their active role in constructing truth. Using a 1914 photograph of Los Angeles as a case study, the essay demonstrates how new materialists can critically engage with visual sources in both research and teaching to examine how they shape meaning. It argues that images are uniquely suited to reveal the entanglements between humans and nonhumans while capturing unintended details often overlooked in textual sources. Photographs, in particular, offer a compelling means to convey abstract concepts-such as matter's vitality and creativity-in a more accessible form.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 3","pages":"611-621"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144734867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Delivering Airpower: How Innovation in Wartime Foreshadowed Modern Supply Chain Strategies.","authors":"Peter Dye","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Modern supply chains claim novel levels of resilience and adaptability, but these were developed in World War I (and later redeployed during World War II) and have been \"reinvented\" in contemporary business contexts. This article highlights how the supply chains developed for wartime aviation logistics anticipated today's notions of supply chain resilience and adaptability. While the logistic innovations of World War II are widely recognized, those developed during World War I, particularly in aviation, are less well known but equally groundbreaking. The Royal Flying Corps pioneered agile supply chain strategies that sustained continuous air superiority on the Western Front-helping break the stalemate of trench warfare. Innovations such as postponement, strategic warehousing, bidirectional supply, recycling, circular manufacturing, and product service systems addressed the challenges of high attrition, technological advancement, and unpredictable demand.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 1","pages":"209-235"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143383583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Safari and the Screen: How Visual Technologies Shaped Italian Colonial Narratives.","authors":"Beatrice Falcucci, Gianmarco Mancosu","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Recent historiography on empire and postcolonialism has highlighted the diverse visual practices and technologies that shaped colonial narratives and knowledge. This article examines how various visual media were used to advance Italy's imperial agenda, drawing on both recent scholarship and original research. Introducing the concept of transmediality and its methodological importance for analyzing colonial cultural and visual practices, the article presents the case of Vittorio Tedesco Zammarano-an explorer, hunter, filmmaker, and writer active in Italian Somalia. Through a close examination of the technologies and cultural practices, this study reflects on how colonial fantasies, desires, and epistemes-particularly those related to hunting and safari-were intertwined with Fascist Italy's colonial ambitions, highlighting broader trans-imperial connections.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 1","pages":"71-105"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143383581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dynamics of Doubt: How ASHRAE Engineers Became Ozone Skeptics, 1974-89.","authors":"Abeer Saha","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) and its response to the ozone crisis in the 1970s, highlighting the science-skepticism that hindered responses to environmental issues in the twentieth century. Although well-positioned to address ozone depletion by developing safer chemical alternatives, ASHRAE resisted regulatory changes, framing concerns over CFC emissions as an attack on engineering and American technological dominance. Their rhetoric of doubt persisted for over a decade, even after corporations like DuPont acknowledged environmental harm and adopted chlorofluorocarbon controls. This study reveals how skepticism within scientifically literate communities can complicate environmental responses and explores the role of professional identity in shaping environmental and technical policy decisions.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 1","pages":"135-160"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143383587","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Erratum.","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a965867","DOIUrl":"10.1353/tech.2025.a965867","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 3","pages":"1"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144734860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the Cover: The Politics of Seeing Pregnancy.","authors":"Agata Ignaciuk, María Jesús Santesmases","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a971297","DOIUrl":"10.1353/tech.2025.a971297","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Frida Kahlo's artistic rendering of childbirth appears on the cover of this issue of Technology and Culture. This essay invites readers to view the history of medicine and technology through images, by tracing multi-sited genealogies of their visual cultures. The shifting representations of pregnancy, miscarriage, and abortion can enrich historical research and teaching on twentieth-century reproductive biomedicine by foregrounding how images produce, circulate, and contest knowledge and power. Yet the different meanings attributed to the same image in different cultures and political regimes underscore that they cannot be fully understood without their historiography and their political work as visual artifacts.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 4","pages":"937-957"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145330710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"You Heard it Here First: Podcasts as a Tool for Public History.","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a971304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2025.a971304","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 4","pages":"1141-1144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145330659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Proving Grounds: How Saudi Arabia Shaped Computer Aided Design Tools Used by American Architects, 1967-83.","authors":"Aaron Tobey","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a971298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2025.a971298","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article reinterprets the early history of computer-aided design (CAD) by relocating its development from U.S. labs to transnational building sites in Saudi Arabia. Drawing on unpublished project records and planning documents, the article shows how American architectural firms working on Saudi-funded megaprojects shaped the routines, software, and visual language of CAD. By framing CAD as a product of geopolitical negotiation-rather than technical inevitability-this article unsettles dominant digital-turn narratives. This analysis contributes to architectural history, STS, and digital studies by demonstrating how design tools emerged through the entanglement of labor, software, and political ambition.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 4","pages":"959-990"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145330667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}