Abstracts/ les résumés Friday / Vendredi, November 6 Public Lecture / Conférence publique

The free circulation of knowledge across borders in academia has been progressively eroded since the 1980s by new opportunities to commercialize research and, since 9/11, by the demand for tighter control on foreign nationals by the national security state.  The production of knowledge that is increasingly both dual use and close to the market, and the insertion of research universities in the global knowledge economy, has transformed the research encounter between the U.S. researchers and their colleagues and students from abroad.  Two concepts of security — security by achievement and security by secrecy — pit traditional academic values of openness and the free exchange of ideas against an increasingly intrusive state apparatus that shackles scientific collaboration and undermines trust. 

This paper opens with a story about the mobility of medico-scientific knowledge and varied spatial contexts of regional genetic health centres in the United States, Canada, and the UK, and uses it to reflect on debates in a number of disciplines concerning what Warwick Anderson has described as “the localness of technoscientific networks, the situated production of ‘globality,’ the transnational process of displacement and reconfiguration, the fragmentation and hybridity of technoscience.” It especially reflects on difficult questions that have been raised about the dynamics of flow and how spatial context influences not only the generation of knowledge but also the justification, legitimation, acceptance, and application of knowledge. These generally underscore the spatial concentration of knowledge and power at certain points in time. The paper then concludes with future considerations for thinking about the means by which scientific knowledge in medical systems exercises the power that it does in the world.

This paper situates post-1945 Canadian defence research in the context of the early Cold War security environment. Canada’s scientific and technological activity in this era was influenced by alliances, most importantly its tripartite defence relationship with Britain and the United States. Yet the history of the Canadian Defence Research Board, a division of the wider defence establishment, contradicts a school of thought deeply rooted in historical scholarship on Canada’s postwar foreign relations that suggests the North American bilateral defence partnership gradually diminished Canada’s defence reliance on the Commonwealth. In fact, Canadian scientists participated in tripartite defence initiatives throughout the early decades of the Cold War. By destabilizing the continentalist school of thought, or what Robert Teigrob has called Canada’s “reorientation of national allegiances,” this paper explores transnational information exchange between tripartite nations and the creation of the Technical Cooperation Program. Ultimately, this paper argues that Canada’s postwar science and technology policy reinforced rather than impaired relations with the Commonwealth during the early Cold War.

Digital humanities are reshaping the historian’s craft in radical ways. This paper explores how one tool of the digital humanities—social network analysis—can help problematize how scientific authority is historically constructed and sometimes disassembled across national borders. Focusing on a case study of what might be considered a failed science, this paper uses social network analysis to map out the distinctly gendered relationships that existed between interwar psychical researchers and their unusual subjects of study. Canadian, American and British researchers argued for the scientific importance of their work while conducting transnational experiments on individuals they conceived of as particularly gifted in bridging material and metaphysical worlds. Illustrating where and when centres of power are located at different historical moments, this paper demonstrates how social network analysis in conjunction with the theories of feminist technoscience can provide important clues as to why some empirical endeavours succeed and others do not.

Operational Research (OR) emerged as a field of research at the École Polytechnique de Montréal in the mid-1970s. Initially, it belonged to the industrial engineering department, before moving to the applied mathematics department in 1984, until the two departments merged ten years later. In this paper, we will see how OR constituted initially a border dividing tenants of qualitative and quantitative approaches in industrial engineering, how it quickly grew in the department of applied mathematics and later became the only field of common interest between the researchers in applied mathematics and industrial engineering. The evolution of OR is to be understood by analyzing the different modes of emergence and evolution of two specialties at the EPM: applied mathematics developed more as a scientific discipline, while industrial engineering was anchored in the engineering profession.

Digital humanities are reshaping the historian’s craft in radical ways. This paper explores how one tool of the digital humanities—social network analysis—can help problematize how scientific authority is historically constructed and sometimes disassembled across national borders. Focusing on a case study of what might be considered a failed science, this paper uses social network analysis to map out the distinctly gendered relationships that existed between interwar psychical researchers and their unusual subjects of study. Canadian, American and British researchers argued for the scientific importance of their work while conducting transnational experiments on individuals they conceived of as particularly gifted in bridging material and metaphysical worlds. Illustrating where and when centres of power are located at different historical moments, this paper demonstrates how social network analysis in conjunction with the theories of feminist technoscience can provide important clues as to why some empirical endeavours succeed and others do not.

Scientific publications have often highlighted discoveries without regard to national borders. Today, a new scientific journal article is published every twenty seconds, in addition to other forms of scientific information. Many initiatives to synthesize and reduce this literature have been pursued. Since the 1970s, major environmental assessment reports have become one method. The reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which encompass thousands of scientific publications, are well-known. Numerous other state of the environment reports populate the publication landscape. To illustrate the history of this form of literature, we will discuss three recent marine environmental assessment reports related to the north eastern Atlantic coast: The State of Nova Scotia’s Coasts Report, the State of the Gulf of Maine Report, and the State of the Scotian Shelf Report. Involving many authors, editors, and illustrators, the preparation of these comprehensive reports occurred as digital technologies significantly affected publication practices. Drawing on documentary evidence and interviews with authors and editors, we will show how international models for environmental assessments were adopted and adapted to produce these reports for diverse audiences and we will also outline evidence of their use in decision making contexts.

A. G. Huntsman’s Belle Isle Strait Expedition of 1923, the first oceanographic expedition organized by a Canadian, can be envisioned as modeled on the Canadian Fisheries Expedition of 1915, in which Huntsman had been a junior partner to the Norwegian fishery biologist Johan Hjort. Examination of Huntsman’s documents shows that this is too facile a view. For example, Huntsman hoped that one of the participants would be M.L. Fernald, a botanist from the Gray Herbarium at Harvard University. Huntsman’s unpublished manuscripts on the expedition, purportedly to give information about the oceanic conditions leading to cod production, show that its results ranged from archaeology to botany. Although Fernald did not take part, his reasons for being interested in the expedition were to document his hypothesis that the flora of northeastern North America had spread there along an emergent borderland after the last glaciation. Huntsman’s aims were less transparent, but it is clear that this Canadian / United States research partnership was intended to be about more than cod. In this, it had more in common with early 19th century natural history expeditions than with the marine science expeditions that followed it a few decades later.

Carmel Finley has recently shown how American politics formed international fisheries management policies based on loosely constructed ideals in fisheries biology. She argues that at the 1955 UN International Technical Conference on the Conservation of the Living Resources of the Sea the US diplomatic agenda, not science, became the foundation of the dominant post-war ‘paradigm’ of fisheries management. This paradigm upheld exploiting international fisheries at the highest possible – and yet supposedly sustainable–levels, to generate a Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY). American fisheries biologists apparently shared a conviction that MSY was scientific and achievable, and swayed other nations’ scientists to their views. Yet a few years earlier key US fisheries biologists had shared concerns about safeguarding exploited fish stocks. What influenced their shift in favour of highly exploitive industrialized fishing practices and against enlarged protective national coastal zones? This paper will argue that a little-noticed gathering of marine and aquatic fisheries biologists from across North America in 1947 was instrumental in effecting this change in attitude. Canadian fisheries biologist A.G. Huntsman convened ‘A Symposium on Fish Populations,’ at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. This paper will explore this meeting’s genesis, disputed ideas, and long-term influences on fisheries science and policy.

During the 1920s, progressives in the US Congress, led by Senator George Norris of Nebraska, fought plans to privatize the government nitrate works at Muscle Shoals, Alabama. These progressives wanted the federal government to produce inexpensive fertilizer and electricity. They drew inspiration from Ontario's Hydro-Commission, from which they sought ideological and technological support. The campaign successfully fended-off privatization attempts by the Republican presidents of the era (one involved Henry Ford), and led to the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933 under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Throughout, these reformers worked to import the Ontario Hydro model into the American South.

Transatlantic air travel was set to grow rapidly after the Second World War. The North Atlantic's notoriously bad weather posed a problem for those early flights, as land-based observatories could not monitor conditions at sea. Canada, the United States, and several European countries addressed this shortcoming with a network of ship-based weather stations scattered across the ocean: the North Atlantic Ocean Station (NAOS) program. Over the decades that followed, these ships worked together to give transatlantic flights from all countries the most accurate and up-to-date meteorological reports possible. Despite European support for the program, American funding cuts diminished the utility of the fleet. The program was abandoned altogether by the 1980s with the advent of weather buoys and satellite observations. While it ran, the NAOS program was a model for international cooperation in support for the public good.

When oil and gas exploration began in earnest in the Canadian High Arctic in the 1970s, companies involved such as Panarctic Oil or Dome Petroleum faced various technological obstacles. These included drilling and support operations in ice conditions as well as transportation to consumers in the South. As engineers were looking for solutions to these challenges they had to cross cultural borders since they had to negotiate between corporate stakeholders who focused on costs and feasibility of technology and the national government who had a developmental stake in the Arctic and supported a ‘Buy Canadian’ agenda. What all three groups of actors seemed to share was technological optimism, which helped establish the Arctic as a site for technological advances whether with respect to artificial islands, drill ships, caissons or LNG carriers. Yet, the commercial success of these was often impeded by the different objectives between making technology and using technology.