A transnational approach to understanding and analyzing knowledge circulation.
Focusing on what happens to knowledge at national borders, rather than treating it as flowing like currents across them, or diffusing out from center to periphery, the contributors to this collection stress the human intervention that shapes and drives how knowledge is processed, mobilized, and repurposed in transnational transactions to serve differing and uneven interests, constraints, and environments. The chapters consider both what knowledge travels and how it travels across borders of varying permeability that impede or facilitate its movement. They look closely at a vast range of platforms and objects of knowledge, from tangible commodities—like hybrid wheat seeds, penicillin, Robusta coffee, naval weaponry, and high-performance computers—to the more conceptual apparatuses of telecommunications, statistics, and food sovereignty. Moreover, this volume decenters the Global North, tracking how knowledge moves along multiple paths across the borders of Mexico, India, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, the Soviet Union, China, Angola, and Palestine and the West Bank, as well as the United States and United Kingdom. The variety of the kinds of knowledge addressed in the chapters brings forth an extraordinary array of state and non-state actors and institutions committed to performing the work needed to move knowledge across national borders.
Edited by:
John Krige
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 28mm
ISBN: 9780226819945
ISBN 10: 0226819949
Pages: 368
Publication Date: 21 October 2022
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction Writing the Transnational History of Knowledge Flows in a Global Age John Krige Chapter 1 Knowledge, State Power, and the Invention of International Science Jessica Wang Part I: Regulating Transnational Knowledge Flows Chapter 2 Harnessing Invention: The British Admiralty and the Political Economy of Knowledge in the World War I Era Katherine C. Epstein Chapter 3 Culture Diplomacy: Penicillin and the Problem of Anglo-American Knowledge Sharing in World War II Michael A. Falcone Chapter 4 Dangerous Calculations: The Origins of the US High-Performance Computer Export Safeguards Regime, 1968–1974 Mario Daniels Chapter 5 Regulating the Transnational Flow of Intangible Knowledge of Space Launchers between the United States and China in the Clinton Era John Krige Part II: Facilitating Transnational Knowledge Flows Chapter 6 Beyond Borlaug’s Shadow: Mexican Seeds and the Narratives of the Green Revolution Gabriela Soto Laveaga Chapter 7 Moving Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Colonial Angola to the Breakfast Tables of Main Street America, 1940–1961 Maria Gago Chapter 8 Statistics and Emancipation from New Deal America to Guerrilla Warfare in Guinea-Bissau Tiago Saraiva Chapter 9 Security versus Sovereignty in a Palestinian Seed Bank Courtney Fullilove Chapter 10 How Data Cross Borders: Globalizing Plant Knowledge through Transnational Data Management and Its Epistemic Economy Sabina Leonelli Conclusion Decentering the Global North John Krige Acknowledgments Contributors Index
John Krige is the Kranzberg Professor Emeritus in the School of History and Sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the coauthor, most recently, of Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Reviews for Knowledge Flows in a Global Age: A Transnational Approach
"""Krige and his collaborators have assembled a powerful array of studies that reconfigure conventional narratives about how knowledge flows. Divided among historical case studies related in some way or another to national and economic security, on the one hand, and agricultural exchanges, on the other, the volume avoids the usual binaries of Global North and Global South—or of guns and butter—emphasizing the efforts to block, shape, or redirect the flow of knowledge. The cast of characters and the variety of regions is massively expanded, to excellent effect."" -- Michael D. Gordin, Princeton University “For too long, ‘global’ histories of science have envisioned an antiquated hydraulic mechanism, pumping out authorized knowledge from northern laboratories to southern deserts. At last, this book reveals instead the densely and intricately reticulated worldwide networks transmitting the concepts and practices of modern science. Abandoning the imperial optic for such multi-sited transnational perspectives makes global science look truly different and far more compelling."" -- Warwick Anderson, University of Sydney ""An excellent, absorbing, and refreshingly revisionist collection of cutting-edge studies by eminent scholars in the transnational history of modern science and technology, organized and edited by a pioneer in the field. Integrating enlightening empirical examinations with penetrating analyses, the volume illuminates brilliantly forces that both propelled and blocked knowledge flow across national borders."" -- Zuoyue Wang, California State Polytechnic University"