North-South knowledge exchange: critical thinking and new perspectives.
This session will explore the processes, as well as the tensions, of knowledge exchange between the Global North and Global South. The panelists of this session are Professors Michael Barany and Gisela Mateos. Below you can find a brief bio of them, as well as the abstracts of their talks. Please check Professor Mateos' paper before the session.
Michael Barany (Edinburgh): Michael Barany is Senior Lecturer in History of Science at the University of Edinburgh and researches and teaches the history and culture of modern science and mathematics. https://mbarany.com.
Title: Context, Perspective, and Endogenous Methodology
Abstract: Thinking globally about connections and exchanges in modern science requires grappling with how our historical subjects and those around them attempted to think and act globally and interconnectedly in their own right. I will discuss from a practical perspective how historians' considerations about access, travel, funding, intelligencing, and information management can productively engage with homologous concerns from the past and the various trails of documentation derived from those past concerns. Such considerations can be especially critical for accounting for and responding to how hegemonic institutions have shaped both the history and historiography of global science through their institutional and archival practices.
Gisela Mateos (UNAM): Gisela Mateos is full professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her main research interests are the history of 20th-century science, particularly physics, and technology in Mexico and Latin America. She focuses on how technical assistance programs have moved scientific and medical practices between socialist countries and the so-called Third World.
Title: Itineraries of atoms in Mexico (1950-1970)
Abstract: After Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1953 “Atoms for Peace” initiative was launched, nuclear sciences and technologies were promoted as tools for development worldwide. Nations responded differently, shaped by concerns over sovereignty, modernity, and local priorities. For example, India’s engagement was entangled with state-building, whereas Mexico, skeptical of becoming a nuclear state, adopted a denuclearizing position by promoting and signing in 1967 the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean. This talk aims to examine how Mexico engaged with “the nuclear” in the period 1950-1970. I follow the itineraries of Mexico’s nuclear physics practices and technologies, entangled with the international promotion of nuclear commodities as a need for social and economic development. Examples of this engagement were the Mobile Radioisotope Exhibition sponsored by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which toured countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe in the early 1960s, and the 1964 acquisition by the Mexican National Nuclear Energy Commission of a TRIGA Mark-III research reactor. These cases show how technologies and practices were shaped locally. Despite the contingencies and specifics of the Mexican case, it offers a window into how the need for nuclear technical assistance was co-created in so-called less-developed countries.
