ICOHTEC 2016
Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto
26 July to 30 July 2016
Organizers
- Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e Tecnologia (CIUHCT)
- International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC)
about the meeting
Innovation and sustainability have become key words of our everyday life, extending from political and economic discourse to teaching curricula and from the lay public to academia. However, the use of these terms is often abstract and simplistic, ignoring the density of their interrelationships in different geographic, historical and civilizational contexts, and the boomerang character of today’s world.
The 43rd ICOHTEC meeting aims at addressing this complex relationship by encouraging papers that contribute to a deeper understanding of the multilayer cultural and material built meaning of innovation and sustainability and on the various roles played by technology in enabling or preventing such interplay.
The symposium covers all periods and areas of the globe. We invite submissions of new, original and unpublished work that offers fresh perspectives for the history of technology as well as exploring sources and methods.
The main theme embraces the concepts of technology, innovation and sustainability as organizing principles, thus perceiving them as actors in the building of today’s globalized society.
ICOHTEC 2016 is organised by CIUHCT at Porto, the capital city of the northern part of Portugal, at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto.
The meeting’s logo - a today’s sketch of the D. Maria iron bridge - is an homage to European engineering. Authored by Eiffel’s atelier, the D. Maria bridge was built of wrought iron to carry the railway across the River Douro at a height of 60 meters above the river. Its two-hinged crescent arch was, at the time, the longest single-arch span in the world. Its construction started on January 5th, 1876 and was completed on October 1st, 1877; the bridge was opened on November 4th, 1877 by King Luís I of Portugal and named after his queen, Maria Pia.
The Portuguese community of historians of technology has already been responsible for the 25th ICOHTEC Annual Meeting, which was held in Lisbon back in 1998, and hosted the 1st Kranzberg Memorial Lecture. Portugal had then an enthusiastic, albeit very small and inexperienced group of young historians of technology, who regarded the organization of ICOHTEC 1998 as a sign of trust by its peers. From then on, the community of Portuguese historians of technology has grown and asserted itself both nationally and internationally. We would like to pay tribute to Professor Robert Angus Buchanan and Professor Carroll Pursell for their strong encouragement.
We are now, once again, proud to receive in Portugal our fellow historians of technology. Additionally, and for the first time, the ICOHTEC meeting will be preceded by a Summer School, which aims at bringing together young apprentices.
Although some of us are now more mature and experienced, a new generation of very promising young scholars has meanwhile joined us and we are all as enthusiastic as before. We thus hope that the 43rd ICOHTEC Annual Meeting will be both scientifically challenging and socially memorable.
See also
Kranzberg Lecture, by Helmuth Trischler (Keynote)