Science, Technology, and the Historical Influence of Race: An Interdisciplinary Conversation. The proposal is for a 2-day workshop to be held in the fall of 2006, a smaller follow-up meeting to be held in the spring of 2007, and preparation of an edited volume. Historians of technology have recently focused their attention on inequitable social agendas embedded in the design of artifacts, engineered structures and systems, and productive labor. Similarly, historians of science have chosen to study applications of science to the production and maintenance of racist thought particularly in the medical and life sciences. Both disciplines have begun to identify important ways in which the presumed objectivity of technological and scientific discourses supports racism. That presumption of value-neutrality has historically sustained not just racialized scientific and technical knowledge but exclusive occupational patterns in these supposedly meritocratic fields, as well. At the same time, scholars in other disciplines such as labor and economic history, and race and gender or urban studies, continue an older commitment to studying institutional and cultural practices that undergird inequality in the United States. From those disciplines there has arisen a vital body of theory regarding race, explicating how notions of difference have achieved centrality in so many private and public spheres. These fields address systemic inequities within urban planning, employment, education, electoral or economic practices, and other structural aspects of modern society. Through a two-day workshop and subsequent, collective preparation of an edited volume of conference papers all of these scholars might profitably share their methodologies and findings to bring a fuller picture of race in the United States. This cross-disciplinary exchange will explore how science and technology, and hierarchical features of American society, support one another. Intellectual Merit: This project integrates concerns of the history of science and technology with those of other disciplines, part of an initiative of the Society for the History of Technology to host small, inter-disciplinary meetings. Through invitations and a widely circulated call for papers we will convene twenty-five junior and senior scholars to discuss race formation in four arenas: The Built Environment, The Technological Career,Instruments and Other Knowledge Systems, and Bodies and Biologies. A follow-up workshop some six months later will bring ten of the participants together to create a published volume of conference papers of unusual scholarly reach. Broader Impact: Race has been understudied in the history of science and technologyand the exchange outlined here will support the address of historic inequities inoccupational, environmental and medical realms. It will also present to other social sciences techniques used in the history of science and technology, including the close study of material artifacts and knowledge systems associated with processes of raceformation. All of the organizers and many of the participants will be women and minority scholars.
