International Projects and Flagship programs
ToE provides an infrastructure for transnational research groups and projects, as well as a vibrant transnational scholarly network.
Over time, ToE has developed two agenda-setting 'flagship' programs making participant projects speak to each other and engaging with pressing societal and scholarly questions.
Intellectual points of departure: Tensions of Europe
- studies technology in European history;
- studies 'technology' broadly in terms of sociotechnical systems including people and values; knowledge, ideas and skills; networks, institutions and governance; user initiatives practices; the natural environment; and so on;
- studies 'Europe' globally, including its transatlantic and (post)colonial relations -- in a global age, European history, too, must be global. This point is even more compelling from a technology perspective;
- studies social TENSIONS in the making of technology and of Europe. ToE studies 'technology' and 'Europe' as human-made, and therefore imagined, situated, contested and conflicted, open-ended historical processes.
Second flagship program: Technology & Societal Challenges, ca. 1800-2050
The second ToE flagship program engaged with current debates on 'grand challenges' haunting our present-day world -- such as climate change and other environmental crises; global inequality; the threatened breakdown of unsustainable cities and energy, mobility, financial, and health systems; migration and security challenges; and so on.
The argument in short:
- Current public and scholarly debates center on social and environmental crises and 'grand challenges' that haunt our present-day world, and call for a transition to a more just and sustainable society;
- Technology plays a pivotal, yet ambiguous role in these debates--as cause as well solution to past and present crises;
- Technology has played this role for centuries (and centainly throughout the modern era);
- Thus emerges the compelling historical question: how was (and is) technology involved in the (un)making of past and present crises, challenges, and societal transitions?
- Tensions of Europe, as a scholarly community studying technology & transnational history, has the network and research experience to address this question.
First flagship program: Technology & European integration/fragmentation, ca. 1850-2000
Initiated in 1999, the first flagship program addressed key debates of its time -- globalization and Europeanization, in Europe represented by the founding, deepening, and widening of the European Union. European integration history at the time predominantly made EU-centered analyses of politicians negotiating treaties. By contrast, Tensions of Europe spotlighted a bottom-up, hidden integration that profoundly shaped European identities, collaborations, and everyday life: Since the 1850s at least, technology producers, regulators and users had connected and fragmented Europe through transnational infrastructure and the circulation of knowledge, people, artefacts, standards, user practices, and so on.
The investigation and writing of a new European history through the lens of technology developed in three overlapping phases.