Last month, between October 9 and 11, I was in Luxembourg to participate in the 2025 Annual Conference of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). Invited by Zachary Furste, I took part in the panel History Channels: Archives, Borders, and the Canalization of the Past, where I presented my paper “Whose Archive – A (Personal) Journey in Search of Chile’s History of Technology” – now available as a preprint on the MediArxiv repository [here is the link].
Before going into that, however, I would like to share a few impressions about the conference and the venue, both of which were very interesting in their own right.
The conference took place on the campus of the Luxembourg University located in Esch-sur-Alzette – a city in the country’s south, right on the border with France. It was my first time there, and I have to say that the campus is really impressive. Located on the site of what was once Luxembourg’s largest steelworks, the architects and urban planners had the great idea of preserving and renovating massive parts of the steelworks’ infrastructure, as well as some ruins (see image below). Thus, the university’s modern buildings were built in dialogue with the country’s and region’s historical industrial past, which gives the campus the character of a true cultural site – having visited dozens of university campuses in many countries, I hadn’t seen such a tangible and explicit mix of infrastructural history and knowledge production before. So, if you have the opportunity or the excuse to visit, I totally recommend it.
Therefore, the SHOT conference couldn’t have found a better venue – this not to even mention that the actual building in which the conference took place, the Maison du Savoir, is a colossal piece of educational infrastructure that made our stay there really comfortable. But the conference itself was also great, which given its size was a very nice surprise – big conferences tend to be a little chaotic, both organization- and content-wise. Besides my own, I attended over ten other panels, and every single presentation I saw was interesting, compelling, and clearly the product of serious and socially committed research. On the other hand, I have always thought that German media studies – at least the Berlin school – has a lot of common ground with the Anglo-Saxon strand of the history of technology, perhaps even more than with US media studies, for example, and this conference seemed to have confirmed this impression. So again, if you are considering participating in the next annual conference, you should definitely give it a try (here is the link).
Finally, a few words about what I presented at the conference. The panel that Zach put together focused on what he called the “canalization of the past” – that is, the infrastructural paths through which the past finds its way, or is actually canalized, into the present. I therefore offered a discussion on both the political and theoretical dimensions of doing research on a specific chapter of Chile’s history of technology – the subject of my dissertation, Project Cybersyn – whose scattered archive is mostly held by institutions and private collections in European countries, where the ownership of very important historical documents is claimed by private individuals who, away from Chile, administer pieces of the technological heritage of the country. So, in my paper – which, as I pointed out above, you can read here – I focused on these issues and asked whether the archive of any piece of technological history or heritage of a country should be publicly available to all, and whether the ownership of the archive that makes this history visible should be brought into the commons – in other words, what are the theoretical and political strategies for continuing to resist, once again, the power that the West exerts over knowledge from the Global South.