Edward Jones-Imhotep
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780262036511
- eISBN:
- 9780262341318
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262036511.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Russian and Former Soviet Union History
Natures and technologies have long been central to the making of modern nations. Only recently, however, have scholars seen nations as sites where the very understandings of the “natural” and the ...
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Natures and technologies have long been central to the making of modern nations. Only recently, however, have scholars seen nations as sites where the very understandings of the “natural” and the “technological” were articulated, contested, and remade in the interests of the nation. This book examines the role of technological failure in crafting both national identities and the distinctive natures that support them. Focusing on the mid-twentieth-century attempt to extend reliable radio communications to the Canadian North, it explores how a group of Canadian defense scientists sought to visualize, map, and catalog the connections between a distinctive natural order of ionospheric storms, auroral displays, and magnetic disturbances on one side, and the particularly severe communication failures that cut the North off from the rest of the nation on the other. Through that project and its related efforts, they gradually transformed machine failures in hostile environments, from the Arctic to outer space, into a defining characteristic of Canadian identity at a time of national redefinition. Tracking those efforts through continental defense strategies, engineering practices, clandestine maps, and material cultures, the book argues that the real and potential failures of machines came to define the nation, its Northern nature, its cultural anxieties, and its geo-political vulnerabilities during the Cold War. More broadly, it argues for technological failures as key sites for linking historical technologies and historical natures, and for writing the histories of “other” nations during the Cold War.Less
Natures and technologies have long been central to the making of modern nations. Only recently, however, have scholars seen nations as sites where the very understandings of the “natural” and the “technological” were articulated, contested, and remade in the interests of the nation. This book examines the role of technological failure in crafting both national identities and the distinctive natures that support them. Focusing on the mid-twentieth-century attempt to extend reliable radio communications to the Canadian North, it explores how a group of Canadian defense scientists sought to visualize, map, and catalog the connections between a distinctive natural order of ionospheric storms, auroral displays, and magnetic disturbances on one side, and the particularly severe communication failures that cut the North off from the rest of the nation on the other. Through that project and its related efforts, they gradually transformed machine failures in hostile environments, from the Arctic to outer space, into a defining characteristic of Canadian identity at a time of national redefinition. Tracking those efforts through continental defense strategies, engineering practices, clandestine maps, and material cultures, the book argues that the real and potential failures of machines came to define the nation, its Northern nature, its cultural anxieties, and its geo-political vulnerabilities during the Cold War. More broadly, it argues for technological failures as key sites for linking historical technologies and historical natures, and for writing the histories of “other” nations during the Cold War.
