New roundtable contribution by Matthias Heymann (with Erik van der Vleuten, Evelien de Hoop, Jonas van der Straeten, Jethron Ayumbah Akallah, Animesh Chatterjee, Prakash Kumar)
Global Histories of Technology in Worlds of Environmental Change. Technology and Culture, vol. 66(1): 11-37 (2025)
Abstract
In the face of diverse and uneven environmental crises across the globe, ongoing efforts to "globalize" the history of technology field may be considered urgent. In doing so, however, we risk uncritically exporting the norms and practices of a predominantly Western-centric field—an arguably colonial act. This roundtable explores four areas of contention: how to conceptualize "the global"; why, how and with whom to study "history" amid threatened "futures"; how to articulate and delineate the field's subject matter ("technology"); and how researchers can collaborate equitably within and across diverse sites around the globe. Building on these discussions, we propose three themes for further conversation: how to transcend the North-South binary without disregarding its critical insights; how to balance the use of locally specific vocabularies with quasi-global terms; and how to develop collaborative relationships with those whose histories historians document, fostering joint experimentation with "historiographical interventions."