The Winners
Laudatio
These brilliant works have been chosen from among high quality monographs that arrived from the USA, Spain, Mexico, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and other countries. The monographs the jury received deal with different geographical settings, from Europe to Chile and Mexico or China, and focus on different historical periods, from the Renaissance to the 21st century.
The Turriano ICOHTEC Prize bears the name of Juanelo Turriano. He was a man born in Milano and spent many years of his life living in the Spanish city of Toledo where he worked for the emperor Charles I. He was a man of great inventiveness and flexibility, assembling all kinds of machinery and finding ingenious solutions to architectural and mechanical challenges. He was a practitioner and left few traces in writing.
He would have been puzzled had he known that a prize for the best book-length work in the history of technology written by early-stage scholars bears the name of a man that, most probably, wrote no books himself. He would, however, have been happy to know how the work of many people like himself, who did not write any books, is being better known and understood thanks to the great contributions of early career scholars such as our awardees today. They fully deserve the acknowledgement and the financial reward provided by the Juanelo Turriano Foundation in Madrid, that has given its unwavering support to ICOHTEC in general and to the Turriano Prize in particular.
It was not easy to pick the winner this year, and, eventually, the jury members decided to split the prize between two high-quality contributions, the one on cycling in the Netherlands by Henk-Jan Dekker and the one on electrification of Mexico by Diana Montaño. Furthermore, Helen Ahner’s solid work on the planetariums has merited the Honourable Mention.
Hank-Jan Dekker’s Cycling Pathways can be used as a proof of how seriously our jury takes interdisciplinarity. Dekker’s study showcases the importance of political factors in the implementation and use of technology. The choice of a long-term perspective de-naturalizes the Dutch exemplarity as a cycling country and shows that it is a result of decades of social mobilization and of sometimes forced cooperation between social movements and different levels of government. He also shows how the material characteristics of cycling and cycling-related infrastructures cement the results of this cooperation and ensure the longevity of these arrangements beyond the continuity of the cooperation between the social actors involved. Besides all the praise Dekker deserves, we invite the author to engage in comparative efforts in the future. This may lead him to nuance his argument that cycling in the Netherlands has received a larger space in traffic policy than in other countries, partly because interest groups and social movements played a greater governance role than elsewhere. It is very flattering for his Dutch public to be praised as a country where government and social movements cooperate most efficiently, but he may wish to take to consideration that in other countries, the priorities of both the government and the social movements may simply be elsewhere. This remark should not deflect our attention from the qualities of Dekker’s fine-tuned analysis – based on extensive archival research – of how technology is put in use in complex settings where policy makers and public works engineers interact and negotiate with citizens’ initiatives and with the everyday attitudes of the public. Show abstract
Diana Montaño’s Electrifying Mexico is an extremely well-written, truly electrifying contribution to history of technology. True, the author is just at the limit of being considered an early-stage researcher and her experience clearly shows this. In her book, she studies the electrification of Mexico City through the users’ experiences. The approach she adopts represents a shift from the elite & large systems perspective on history of electricity, in line with the recent trend in the history of electrification promoted by several young scholars such as herself, the Turkish historian Nurçin Ileri or the Spanish scholar Daniel Pérez-Zapico. The aim of Montaño’s book is to understand how people experienced and reacted to electrification of spaces as part of their everyday lives. For this purpose, she mobilizes the notion of the electricscape and a wide range of sources including fiction. Montaño takes a postcolonial approach on modernity & modernizing nation-states and the western/non-western dichotomy. Her work is a valuable, well-researched and well-argued contribution to the effort of many among us to finally bury the diffusionist vision of technology as spreading from the developed West to the backward rest of the world.
Helen Ahner’s work on the planetariums is another proof of the liveliness and interdisciplinarity of the recent works in the history of technology. She focuses on planetariums in Germany and Austria, but her manuscript is no classical institutional history. It could be considered a contribution to the cultural history of technology, a particularly dynamic area within our field, enriched further by a certain anthropological sensitivity Ahner brings to her historical writing. For Ahner, the planetariums have been spaces of production of knowledge and of use of technology, but also places of production of experience. We grant her the Honourable Mention for her original approach extending to bodily experiences and history of emotions, a trend that we think should be encouraged in the history of technology.
Interview of Henk-Jan Dekker
Who are you and how did you get interested in the history of technology?
My name is Henk-Jan Dekker, and I’m currently working as a post-doctoral researcher at CNRS-CIRED in Paris. As a master student I was very interested in the material processes behind the circulation of ideas, including the technologies involved. Having said that, I did not immediately expect to become a historian of technology until I was looking for PhD positions after my studies. I was lucky enough to come across, and find a position in, Ruth Oldenziel’s project Bicycle Challenges, which appealed to my interest in technology, sustainability, as well as my love for cycling.
Your winning study in 2 sentences?
I studied how politicians, engineers, and activists at national, provincial, and local levels governed the creation of Dutch cycling infrastructure. This contested process, dating back to the 1920s, led to the construction of thousands of kilometers of cycling paths, which forms one of the explanations, if by no means the only one, for the historically high levels of cycling in the country.
Do you have any memories from Icohtec/Your favourite memory from Icohtec?
I have great memories from attending the Summer School and conference in Saint-Étienne in 2018! I met many great people there, and the conference party at the old mines of the city was a very appropriate location for a history of technology event.
Advice for early career scholars when trying to complete a book-length study?
Start writing early, and keep rewriting the chapters. Having a few people read along who can provide a fresh set of eyes on your texts is also crucial, as it becomes harder to see your own work clearly after a while. And keep an eye on the overall narrative of the book, it should be more than a collection of loosely connected papers in my view.
PRIZE COMMITTEE
Dr. Darina Martykánová (Chairperson)
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Departamento de Historia Contemporánea
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
Campus de Cantoblanco
28049 – Madrid, Spain
darina.martykanova@uam.es
Dr. Irina Gouzévitch
Centre Maurice Halbwachs
École Normale Supérieure
48, boulevard Jourdan
75014 Paris, France
irina.gouzevitch@ens.fr
Dr. Klaus Staubermann
Stiftung Historische Museen Hamburg
Deutsches Hafenmuseum
Kopfbau Schuppen 50A
Australiastraße
20457 Hamburg, Germany
k.b.staubermann@gmail.com
Dr. Matti La Mela
Uppsala University
Matti.lamela@abm.uu.se
Dr. Jacopo Pessina
Department of Civilisations and Forms of Knowledge
Via Pasquale Paoli, 15
56126 Pisa, Italy
japessina@tiscali.it