This research project looks at two intertwined processes in the history of North American and German geography from the early 20th century to the 1970s. First, the shifting hegemonic relations between “theory-importer” United States and […]
Kategória: English Blog
The Ghana Job: Opening Socialist Hungary to the “Developing World”
17 April 5:30 PM Seminar Room Department of Sociology Rutgers University 26 Nichol Ave New Brunswick, NJ 08901 facebook event Why was Hungary interested in the decolonized “developing world”? What does this episode of Eastern […]
Tracing the Global History of the Quantitative Revolution: The Transnational History of Central Place Theory
My book project is about the global histories of the “quantitative revolution” in geography. The quantitative revolution has been an epochal textbook chapter in geography’s canonical history, when the discipline transformed into a rigorous social science backed by predictive mathematical methods in the early Cold War. An iconic scientific concept of this quantitative movement, most notably related to Walter Christaller (1933) and August Lösch (1939), was central place theory (CPT). With the globalization of the quantitative revolution after its emergence from the Second World War in the United States, location theories such as CPT became widespread in urban and regional planning across the world. How did quantitative spatial analysis and planning develop in different parts of the world? In what different geographical contexts were location theories like CPT read, reinterpreted, applied, and mobilized? How were these often very different contexts connected? This book offers to fill this significant gap in geography’s twentieth century global history by deconstructing the mainstream Anglo-American narrative and tracing the quantitative revolution through the circulation and local applications of CPT in the “Second” and “Third” worlds and into the pre-Cold War era.
Why is the decolonization of the history of modern science and technology important in Eastern Europe?
Why is the decolonization of the history of modern science and technology important? So that we can understand why Francis Bacon’s iconic title page image of a European caravella navigating through the pillars of Hercules in his book Instauratio Magna (Great Instauration, 1620) or Novum Organum Scientiarum (“new instrument of science”), which indicated the new program for modern empirical (colonial) scientific development, was actually taken from Andrés García de Céspedes’s book, Regimiento de navegación (Madrid, 1606). This shows the Northwestern European (Dutch, British, German), Protestant hegemonic shift, which stigmatized the downfall of “luxurious”, “inefficient”, “rapacious”, “unindustrialized”, “state-led capitalist” Spain, the Iberian or Southwestern European imperial-colonial project, against the “industrial revolution” and “scientific revolution” of the Northerners, the latter of which the image became a symbol. The deconstruction of this narrative is important in revealing the concealed global histories of colonial scientific and technological development, which was partly a precondition for the development in the new hegemonic centre in Europe. The South American decolonialist approach might be an important influence in decolonizing Eastern European knowledge production, since the Northwestern-Atlantic-Protestant narrative of scientific development, largely present in social scientists’ work such as Max Weber or Karl Marx, was dominantly diffused in Eastern Europe as our Eurocentric understanding of global scientific and economic development. I was educated according to this narrative already in primary school.
Ousmane Sembène’s Ceddo (1977)
Just discovered Ousmane Sembène, one of the founders of (black) African cinema. One of his movies, Ceddo (1977) presents the relatively undiscovered historical topic of the Islamization of black Africa, the conflict of Islam and […]
The first All-African Peoples’ Conference on 5-13 December 1958 in Accra
You can read about the event and all later conferences on wikipedia. “The ‘All-African Peoples Conference’ (AAPC) was partly a corollary and partly a different perspective to the modern Africa states represented by the Conference […]
The critical geographies of scientific knowledge and urban policy mobilities
Why and how do theories and policies travel? Who are involved in mobilizing and adapting them to local contexts and interests? What social groups do they affect and who benefits or gets disadvantaged? This class aims to encourage students to engage critically in these questions by introducing literature on the geographies of scientific knowledge and urban policy mobilities.
On November 14, I will be holding a lecture and seminar in the frames of a lecture series about sustainable development in Central and Eastern Europe at Kaposvár University in Hungary.
