Abstract This article critically surveys the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and modern Middle East History. Scholarship in STS has helped transform the writing of history by developing new ways of thinking about what the political and the technical are and how they work. Historians of the modern Middle East have expanded on these microstudies to think about the larger, more extended effects beyond the laboratory, and to reconfigure the role of nature and technology in the reassembly of questions of agency, knowledge production, governance, political community and nation, and possibilities for democracy in the region. The discussion tracks the turn to the material or technical in modern Middle East History by placing the nonhuman at the center of the analysis of power. Making extensive use of industry and company archives, recent scholarship has drawn on STS to introduce new puzzles to the field of Middle East History concerning the political economy of the countryside, large-scale infrastructures, energy and democracy, and the political agency of the multinational corporation.
...More
Review
Nicholas J. Rowland;
Jan-Hendrik Passoth;
(2015)
Review of "Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline"
(/isis/citation/CBB402384388/)
Chapter
Cravo, Télio;
(2014)
Scientific Instruments, Booksellers and Engineers in Imperial Brazil: Building Bridges and Roads in Minas Gerais, 1835--1889
(/isis/citation/CBB001420899/)
Book
Eike-Christian Heine;
Martin Meiske;
(2022)
Beyond the Lab and the Field: Infrastructures as Places of Knowledge Production Since the Late Nineteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB685686375/)
Article
Matthew Henry;
(2020)
Making Weather Vertical: Meteorology and the Temporalities of Infrastructural Atmospheres in New Zealand, Ca. 1920–1950
(/isis/citation/CBB341875825/)
Article
Sigrid Irene Wentzel;
(December 2020)
State of Uncertainty: Educating the First Railroaders in Central Sakha (Yakutiya)
(/isis/citation/CBB714125377/)
Article
Mike Michael;
(June 2020)
London’s fatbergs and affective infrastructuring
(/isis/citation/CBB218635362/)
Article
Christopher Lawless;
(2020)
Assembling airspace: The Single European Sky and contested transnationalities of European air traffic management
(/isis/citation/CBB169587089/)
Article
Benjamin K. Sovacool;
Katherine Lovell;
Marie Blanche Ting;
(November 2018)
Reconfiguration, Contestation, and Decline: Conceptualizing Mature Large Technical Systems
(/isis/citation/CBB797225432/)
Article
Ben Collier;
James Stewart;
(2022)
Privacy Worlds: Exploring Values and Design in the Development of the Tor Anonymity Network
(/isis/citation/CBB749753638/)
Article
Tauri Tuvikene;
(2022)
Absence, Presence, and Mobility: A Landscape Approach to an Unfinished Tram Project
(/isis/citation/CBB408387470/)
Article
John E. Mohr;
(March 2021)
The Freeway Journey: Landscape and Mobility in the Southern Auto Industry
(/isis/citation/CBB793055303/)
Article
Casper Bruun Jensen;
(2022)
Emerging Potentials: Times and Climes of the Belt and Road Initiative in Cambodia and Beyond
(/isis/citation/CBB553812676/)
Article
Raquel Velho;
Sebastián Ureta;
(2019)
Frail modernities: Latin American infrastructures between repair and ruination
(/isis/citation/CBB686451293/)
Article
Jakkrit Sangkhamanee;
(2021)
Bangkok Precipitated: Cloudbursts, Sentient Urbanity, and Emergent Atmospheres
(/isis/citation/CBB114308689/)
Article
Signe Lindgård Andersen;
(2021)
Making Fast-Track Surgery Transportable: Sino-Danish Travel Work
(/isis/citation/CBB018270667/)
Article
Katie Shilton;
(March 2018)
Engaging Values Despite Neutrality: Challenges and Approaches to Values Reflection during the Design of Internet Infrastructure
(/isis/citation/CBB184768397/)
Book
Huub Dijstelbloem;
(2021)
Borders as Infrastructure: The Technopolitics of Border Control
(/isis/citation/CBB684823908/)
Article
Daniel Greene;
(2022)
Landlords of the internet: Big data and big real estate
(/isis/citation/CBB116395527/)
Article
Cymene Howe;
Jessica Lockrem;
Hannah Appel;
Edward Hackett;
Dominic Boyer;
Randal Hall;
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson;
Albert Pope;
Akhil Gupta;
Elizabeth Rodwell;
Andrea Ballestero;
Trveor Durbin;
Farès el-Dahdah;
Elizabeth Long;
Cyrus Mody;
(2016)
Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk
(/isis/citation/CBB477865395/)
Article
Prince K Guma;
(October 2020)
Incompleteness of urban infrastructures in transition: Scenarios from the mobile age in Nairobi
(/isis/citation/CBB239613499/)
Be the first to comment!