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This article reconstructs the historical transformation of mobility in the city of Maastricht in the period 1950–1980, from cycling as the most popular mode of traveling in the 1950s to car driving by the end of the 1970s. Based on an analysis of written sources and oral history interviews with Maastricht travelers and other practitioners who experienced this shift themselves, this article sheds light on this historical transformation, its key actors, and its main drivers. Combining insights from studies of social practice-based perspectives on mobility, historical sociotechnical transitions, and the model of urban obduracy, this study seeks to contribute to understanding why and how cities may transform toward being unsustainable places. Furthermore, it aims to show how social practice approaches can give more context-sensitive insights into processes of transformation and transition compared to established MLP-based transition approaches, by giving more attention to local meanings.

It is well known that the Ministry of State Security in the former German Democratic Republic was deeply involved in wiretapping and eavesdropping on both foreigners and its citizens. It is less widely known that, against this background, the Stasi developed a keen interest in technologies and techniques of speaker identification, such as the visualization of recorded sound and aural analysis. How exactly did Stasi employees analyze the sound of voices? How did listening become a legitimate way of knowing in this context? And why did speaker identification not become as powerful as the Stasi had hoped? Empirically, this essay draws on documents from the Stasi’s former archives. Theoretically, it builds on “sonic skills” in the sciences to clarify the identification practices and distinguishes between the “logic of forensics” and the “logic of surveillance” to understand why the Stasi ran ashore in its sound analysis endeavor. Finally, it aims to contribute to understanding the information paradox in the Stasi historiography and its implications for the history of science.

Children were central to Dutch and Belgian colonial projects. Children and youth were the objects of colonial interventions issued by missionaries and officials. However, children could also become actors who produced change in a colonial context. Crucial in colonial policies towards children was the separation of children from their parents, communities and/or culture (‘child separation’) in all kinds of forms – temporary or permanent, far from home or close by, in contact with their own community or cut off from it – and to various degrees of coercion (voluntary, from a situation of dependence, enforced with punishment or violence). Child separation projects could involve adoption, foster parenting, ‘apprenticeships’ serving a household, boarding schools or day schools. It could concern children from the local elite, but also children who ended up on the margins of their own communities or were even bought out of slavery. Child separation was never about education only, but always imposed specific morals and life styles on its subjects as well. It caused profound fault lines in colonised families and communities. For colonial politics, it was key to controlling, influencing and disciplining the colonised population (‘governmentality’). In the case of children of ethnically mixed descent, child separation often involved policing hierarchical racialised boundaries in the colony; in the case of indigenous children, it aimed at transforming the colonised population. Christian missions were pivotal in child separation projects. This special issue, therefore, pleads for a more central place of Catholic and Protestant missions in the analysis of Dutch colonial history, comparable to Belgian historiography. Finally, it is precisely these (missionary) colonial projects, often labeled as ‘soft’ or ‘civilising’, that have passed unnoticed into post-colonial discourses, organisations and practices, such as transnational adoption or surrogacy, and countless development projects in which children, detached from their own family and context, must be ‘saved’. Without proper scholarly attention for Christian missions in colonial history, these traces of the colonial past in the postcolonial present will not be recognised as such. Kinderen stonden centraal in Nederlandse en Belgische koloniale projecten. Kinderen en jongeren waren daarbij het object van koloniaal handelen van missionarissen, zendelingen en ambtenaren, maar zij konden ook zelf actoren worden die in een koloniale context veranderingen veroorzaakten. Cruciaal in deze koloniale projecten was het scheiden van kinderen van hun ouders, van hun gemeenschappen en van hun cultuur (child separation) in allerlei vormen – tijdelijk of voorgoed, ver van huis of dichtbij, in contact met de eigen gemeenschap of volledig daarvan afgesneden – en in diverse gradaties van dwang (vrijwillig, vanuit een situatie van afhankelijkheid, afgedwongen met straffen of geweld). Concreet kon het gaan om adoptie, pleegouderschap, het in huis nemen van werkende ‘leerjongens en -meisjes’, kostscholen of dagscholen. De kinderen zelf waren afkomstig uit de lokale elite, of het waren juist kinderen die in de marge van hun eigen gemeenschappen terecht waren gekomen, of zelfs door missionarissen uit slavernij werden gekocht. De doelstellingen van deze praktijken betroffen nooit alleen onderricht, maar altijd ook het aanleren van een bepaalde levenswijze en moraal. Niet alleen veroorzaakten de scheiding en heropvoeding ingrijpende breuklijnen in gekoloniseerde families en gemeenschappen; voor de koloniale politiek waren deze kinderen de sleutel tot het controleren, beinvloeden en disciplineren van de gekoloniseerde bevolking (governmentality). In het geval van kinderen van etnisch gemengde komaf ging het vaak om het bewaken van de hierarchische geracialiseerde grenzen in de kolonie; in het geval van lokale kinderen meer om het transformeren van de gekoloniseerde bevolking. Van veel instellingen voor opvoeding en onderwijs van deze kinderen vormden christelijke missie- en zendingsorganisaties de spil. In en met dit themanummer wordt daarom ook een lans gebroken voor de integratie van missie en zending in het analyseren van de Nederlandse koloniale geschiedenis, in navolging van de Belgische historiografie. Tot slot zijn het juist deze vaak als ‘zacht’ of ‘civiliserend’ aangemerkte koloniale projecten die ongemerkt zijn overgegaan in postkoloniale discoursen, organisaties en praktijken, zoals transnationale adoptie of draagmoederschap, en talloze ontwikkelingsprojecten waarin kinderen, losgezongen van hun eigen familie en context, ‘gered’ moeten worden. Zonder gedegen wetenschappelijke aandacht voor de rol van christelijke missie- en zendingsorganisaties in de koloniale geschiedenis zullen deze sporen van het koloniale verleden in het postkoloniale heden niet als dusdanig worden herkend.

This article reconstructs the history of underground parking in the Dutch city of Maastricht by connecting the model of obduracy (i.e., “resistance to change”) with the concept of upscaling, which offers new insights in historic urban transitions. We discuss how the decision-making process about the building of the first underground parking garage (Vrijthof) in the late 1960s was a starting point of a growing obduracy of the urban practice of car use and parking in the inner city of Maastricht. We argue that this obduracy can be explained by the growing interconnections between the cultural meanings of historic squares and urban car use, expertise of urban planners, traffic experts and parking operators, parking and traffic policies and regulations, and underground parking infrastructures. Ironically, the expansion of underground parking in Maastricht can be seen as a pivotal part of the successful upscaling and increasing obduracy of car mobility in this town, but at the same time significantly affects the upscaling of local sustainable mobility innovations forty years later and beyond.

This article discusses children’s novels about Eurasian children who were sent from the Dutch East Indies to the Netherlands for the purpose of character reformation. The corpus shows a remarkable dominance of girl characters, while in actual practice it was mostly Eurasian boys who were sent away for secondary education. I explain this discrepancy between literary text and socio-historical context through the shaping influence of literary genre – that is, of the tomboy story in this particular case. This deflection largely invalidates colonial children’s novels as reliable sources of information about historical educative practices, but it makes them all the more informative regarding the attitudes and values that drove these practices. I conclude by observing that these attitudes and values were anything but homogeneous or coherent, but allowed for a certain bandwidth of variation, which undercuts stark contrasts between colonisers and colonised. Dit artikel bespreekt kinderboeken over Indo-Europese kinderen die vanuit Nederlands-Indie naar Nederland werden gestuurd met het oog op karaktervorming. Opvallend genoeg spelen meisjes het vaakst de hoofdrol in deze romans, terwijl het in werkelijkheid vooral Indo-Europese jongens waren die naar Nederland werden gestuurd voor middelbaar onderwijs. Ik verklaar deze discrepantie tussen literaire tekst en sociaal-historische context vanuit de sturende rol van literaire genre-conventies, in dit specifieke geval, van de zogenaamde ‘bakvis roman’. De dominantie van literaire genres diskwalificeert koloniale kinderliteratuur als een betrouwbare bron over historische opvoedkundige praktijken, maar het maakt ze des te informatiever waar het de houdingen en waarden betreft die ten grondslag lagen aan deze praktijken. Ik concludeer dat deze houdingen en waarden allesbehalve samenhangend of homogeen waren, maar een grote onderlinge variatie vertonen, wat het idee van een scherpe tegenstelling tussen kolonisator en gekoloniseerde ondergraaft.

There are many histories of the chemical industry but very few systematic studies that portray the changing relations between chemistry and industry. This essay tackles the issue by looking to evolving practices and to changes in semantics in particular. On the practical level, both chemistry and industry changed greatly between about 1750 and 1950, which led to different types of interactions over the course of time. Special attention is paid to the emergence and subsequent history of the concept of the Second Industrial Revolution (ca. 1870-1900). It is arguedand illustrated by several examplesthat historians using that concept have tended to underestimate the role of chemistry in industry before about 1870 and have overestimated its role after that date. The rhetorical repertoires of historical actors had great influence on the ways historians later perceived the period of the Second Industrial Revolution. Moreover, the meanings of the key words that we use to describe historical processes have changed considerably over time. The meanings of the terms chemistry and industry both changed, as did those of terms such as technology, art, science, philosophy, and knowledge. This happened most fundamentally between about 1750 and 1850, a period called a Sattelzeit (transition period) by the German historian Reinhart Koselleck for that very reason. Awareness of those semantic changes is crucial for a better understanding of the changing relationships between chemistry and industry, especially for the period before about 1850.

It is a special moment in the history of STS. With the young discipline transitioning into a not so-young-field-anymore, there is plenty of reason for celebrations: defining groups are celebrating remarkable anniversaries and individual careers are celebrated when founding figures retire. These celebrations are also excellent moments for reflections on pasts, presents and futures of STS and the place of STS in the wider world. In this conversation, Wiebe Bijker, recently subject of his own retirement celebration in Maastricht (Bijker 2017), shares his views on STS. We travel with him from the Netherlands to India, and briefly stop in Edinburgh at SSU where we find the origin of the SCOT abbreviation. On the way, we discuss Dutch activism, teaching, the institutionalization of STS, the emergence of international networks, and different roads STS can take. We end with an optimistic view towards a global future, while emphasizing the importance of the inclusion of history and the classics.

This essay analyzes the exhibition “Scienza Universale,” which was to be a central part of the 1942 world’s fair in Rome. Although in the end World War II kept the fair from happening, the plans for the exhibit were finished, and they allow for an in-depth analysis of the propagandistic uses of science in fascist Italy. The essay investigates what the regime sought to accomplish with a public display of science, why it chose to stress science’s universal character, and how various stakeholders’ motives played out in the exhibit design. Although fascism is not generally known for either its embrace of science or its internationalism, in this instance both played a major role in the way the state presented itself. “Universal Science,” as depicted in the exhibit, carried messages that were meant to promote a fascist conception of civilization and world order and to stake out Italy’s position vis-a-vis Nazi Germany in particular.

The new field of the history of knowledge is often presented as a mere expansion of the history of science. We argue that it has a greater ambition. The re-definition of the historiographical domain of the history of knowledge urges us to ask new questions about the boundaries, hierarchies, and mutual constitution of different types of knowledge as well as the role and assessment of failure and ignorance in making knowledge. These issues have pertinence in the current climate where expertise is increasingly questioned and authority seems to lose its ground. Illustrated with examples from recent historiography of the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, we indicate some fruitful new avenues for research in the history of knowledge. Taken together, we hope that they will show that the history of knowledge could build the expertise required by the challenges of twenty-first century knowledge societies, just like the history of science, throughout its development as a discipline in the twentieth century, responded to the demands posed by science and society.

Handloom weaving is the second most important livelihood in rural India after farming. Improving handloom technologies and practices thus will directly affect the lives of millions of Indians, and this is similar for many other communities in the global South and East. By analyzing hand-loom weaving as a socio-technology, we will show how weaving communities are constantly innovating their technologies, designs, markets, and social organization—often without calling it innovation. This demonstration of innovation in handloom contradicts the received image of handloom as a pre-modern and traditional craft that is unsustainable in current societies and that one should strive to eliminate: by mechanization and/or by putting it into a museum. © 2018. This is the authors' accepted and refereed manuscript to the article. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2018.0058

The use and abuse of anachronism is often seen as the quintessence of the writing of history. Historians tend to conceive it as the hardcore of their m?tier to avoid anachronism. It designates a confusion in order of time, especially the mistake of placing an event, attitude, or circumstance too early. The awareness of historical anachronism is omnipresent in times of a radical rewriting of history, in particular as a result of political transformation. History reflects the needs and ambitions of a political context, and the sense of what is deemed historically significant does not remain unattached hereby. Chronology and anachronism are essential to particular conceptions of history, and if history is in a process of being rewritten, they are the first items to be addressed by the defenders of the old system and the advocates of a new discourse. In political debates on the use or abuse of history anachronism is often seen as ultimate proof of the (un-)reliability of new insights and conceptions. As anachronism is defined as a way of transferring contemporary sets of values, assumptions and interpretative categories, every political reorientation inevitably provokes a discussion on that level. If a ?new nation? is in search of a ?new past?, a new reflection on the basic categories of historical thinking becomes necessary. The changing discourses in South African historiography since the end of Apartheid serve here as an illuminative example.

Controlled human malaria infections are clinical trials in which healthy volunteers are deliberately infected with malaria under controlled conditions. Controlled human malaria infections are complex clinical trials: many different groups and institutions are involved, and several complex technologies are required to function together. This functioning together of technologies, people, and institutions is under special pressure because of potential risks to the volunteers. In this article, the authors use controlled human malaria infections as a strategic research site to study the use of control, the role of trust, and the interactions between trust and control in the construction of scientific knowledge. The authors argue that tandems of trust and control play a central role in the successful execution of clinical trials and the construction of scientific knowledge. More specifically, two aspects of tandems of trust and control will be highlighted: tandems are sites where trust and control coproduce each other, and tandems link the personal, the technical, and the institutional domains. Understanding tandems of trust and control results in setting some agendas for both clinical trial research and science and technology studies.

Things are thick with politics. This essay illustrates the point by focusing on a variety of technologies that help to manage water: anicuts and tanks in India, dikes and a storm surge barrier in the Netherlands, and levees in New Orleans. Technologies are not only shaped by political forces; they also exert political force themselves: on social stratification in Indian villages or on government stability in the Netherlands. We should recognize, then, that the functioning of technologies and the functioning of societies are intricately linked. The essay traces this interlinking by using the concept of “technological culture.” It argues that the different styles of coastal engineering in the United States and in the Netherlands can be explained by differences in their technological cultures, particularly the different styles of risk handling. This conclusion is then applied to the Indian case and to issues of development, democracy, and innovation.

After a “prehistory” in economic geography, the study of centre-periphery relationships became fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1961, the American sociologist Edward Shils (1910–95) was one of the first, if not the first, to apply the distinction between centre and periphery to the world-wide scientific community. Shortly thereafter, a growing number of studies on development and underdevelopment put the centre-periphery dichotomy firmly on the intellectual map, at least in left-wing circles. Especially influential were the “dependence theory” of Andre Gunder Frank (1929–2005), and the “word-system approach” of his fellow Neo-Marxist Immanuel Wallerstein (born 1930). These penetrating analyses of interdependences on a global scale were written long before “globalisation” became a fashionable term. When in the 1980s Neo-Marxism lost much of its intellectual attraction, the centreperiphery dichotomy developed into a more neutral distinction, often, but not always, devoid of an anti-capitalist message. In the meantime the concepts centre and periphery had hesitatingly entered the history of science. In 1973 Rainald von Gizycki used the terms in a paper in Shils’ journal Minerva, followed more than a decade later by Gabor Pallo and Svante Lindqvist. Nonetheless, inspection of reviews on “science and developing

relationship is not as straightforward?humans dominating nature?as the phrase suggests. It is, for example, mediated in complex ways by science and technology. In this essay I will focus on one recent crisis in this relationship between the Dutch and the sea, the disastrous flood of 1953, and its resolu tion through the Delta Plan, and in particular the building of the storm surge barrier in the Oosterschelde.1

Cet article demontre l'influence des femmes et leur participation aux constructions de logements publics aux Pays-Bas a travers l'existence et l'histoire du Comite de Conseil Consultatif Feminin sur le Logement Public. Plus generalement, il est question des femmes et de leur relation a l'architecture urbaine.

How is it possible that the USA failed to keep New Orleans dry, when large parts of the Netherlands can exist below sea level? This question, with all its implicit rhetoric about the big and mighty Americans and the small and weak Dutch, generated a flock of American expeditions to the Netherlands in the aftermath of the flooding of New Orleans by hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. The big US television networks, channels such as National Geographic, and political delegations, including the Louisiana governor and members of the US Congress, visited the Netherlands within a few months after the flooding, and all parties returned with spirited reports of how the Americans could learn from the Dutch. Does this suggest that the US Corps of Engineers is less able than the Rijkswaterstaat engineers in the Netherlands? I will argue that something else is going on: that the difference is not one of expertise and competence. In this paper I compare the styles of US and Dutch coastal engineering, and argue that they express different conceptions of risk management in relation to flooding. These differences can, perhaps, be explained by reference to the wider technological cultures of both countries, rather than to the specific engineering cultures. The core of my analysis, however, is aimed at the styles of coastal engineering. In this paper I am not interested in blaming artefacts or humans – levees/dikes 1 and warning systems – or politicians or engineers involved in their design or maintenance. My conjecture is that even had everyone and everything functioned effectively, the historical style of American coastal engineering would encourage accepting the kind of flooding that occurred after Katrina.