Northwestern Events Calendar

Oct
12
2015

SHC Klopsteg Lecture: FREDRIK MEITON

When: Monday, October 12, 2015
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM CT

Where: University Hall, Hagstrum Room, UH 201, 1897 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Cost: OPEN FREE

Contact: Natasha O Dennison   (847) 491-3525

Group: Science in Human Culture Program

Category: Academic

Description:

FREDRIK MEITON: SHC and History, Northwestern University

TITLE "Electrical Palestine: Jewish and Arab Technopolitics under British Rule"

Description: In 1921, the British mandatory government in Palestine granted an exclusive, countrywide concession to electrify the area. The concessionaire, a Zionist engineer by the name of Pinhas Rutenberg, soon set to work realizing his grand scheme: a hydro-electrical power station at the confluence of the Jordan and Yarmuk rivers, connected to a countrywide electric grid.
Drawing on records from the Palestine Government, Jewish and Arab press and political organizations, and the archives of the Israel Electric Corporation, the talk highlights an important instance in Palestine's history of negotiating nature, technology, and people. Specifically, it charts the building of mandatory Palestine’s first and only hydro-electrical power plant, and the critical role it played in creating a national electric grid in mandatory Palestine. Naharayim, as the plant was called, was a hydro-electrical machine made up of organic and inorganic elements. Envisioning and building it involved a calculus of environmental, technological, economic, and political variables. And it relied on various and seemingly incongruous forms of expertise. At every step of the process, Rutenberg’s undertaking had to contend with competing claims, emanating from the Jewish and Arab communities in Palestine, as well as the non-human environment. By generating electricity and distributing it over an imagined Jewish national space, the imaginary acquired a material dimension. This in turn allowed for the emergence of a national space capable of hosting a number of national objects, such as an economy, industry, agriculture, politics, and culture. The talk demonstrates how the character of those national objects was shaped in critical ways by the negotiations involved in producing them, while also influencing Arab-Jewish relations in ways that reverberates through to the present.

Bio: Fredrik Meiton is a historian of science and technology in the modern Middle East. His research focuses on the intersection of politics, science, and technology, especially in the context of colonial development. He is currently at work on a book manuscript based on his dissertation, with the working title “Electrical Palestine: Jewish and Arab Technopolitics under British Rule.” The book charts the construction of Palestine’s electric grid as it co-evolved with the increasingly divided politics and society of the area, in an effort to rethink both the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the interplay of power and technology more broadly.

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