Research Programs Inventing Europe and Tensions of Europe use a much neglected, but highly appropriate, lens to look at the European integration process. Researchers will examine how technology operated as an agent of change in the contested processes of the making of European spaces. Technology is defined not only as machines, products, systems, and infrastructures but also as skills and knowledge that make them work. In addition, technological change is understood as a deeply political and social process involving people and institutions. Using this contextual definition of technology, the research will thus focus on how technical communities, social groups, and citizens have contested, projected, performed, and reproduced ‘Europe’ in constructing and using a range of technologies. These include in particular: 1) infrastructures such as railways, roads, and electricity networks; 2) knowledge networks and large-scale technological European projects; 3) consumer products and user regimes in a wide range of areas from leisure, to food and construction.
Currently a federated research program exists. A large part is funded through the EUROCORES program of the European Science Foundation (ESF). Related projects are financed by other funding structures.
The ESF EUROCORES program Inventing Europe: Technology and the Making of Europe, 1850 to the Present aims at looking at Europe's past to explore which European spaces were constructed and integrated since 1850 by whom, why, and with which kind of impact, e.g. who was marginalized and silenced? The aim is to analyse the emergence of various spaces in which some notion of Europe or 'non-Europe' constituted social, economic, political and cultural relations as well as to place the European integration history that begun after the Second World War into much deeper and broader history of constructing and experiencing various Europes since 1850. Since the imagined and lived Europes were important vectors in colonial, and transatlantic crossings as well as in encounters of what became defined as West and East, the program will look for Europe in a global world and approach the question of European integration through global circulations, and crossings.
The approach taken in Inventing Europe to the study of European history and the European integration process has been pioneered within the ESF Scientific Network Tensions of Europe (co-funded by a large number of European research councils and the USA NSF), later continued under the auspices of the private Dutch Foundation for the History of Technology (SHT). This network of scholars produced the research agenda which is at the roots of Inventing Europe, and will continue to play a key role in its further research.
Stichting Historie der Techniek -- Revised: 14-04-2010 Chamber of Commerce Eindhoven 41155291.