Science, Technology, and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard (In Person)

Date: 

Monday, March 6, 2023, 12:15pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge Street, Thomas Chan-Soo Kang Room (S050)

"China and Global Small Hydropower in the 1980s"

Speaker:

Arunabh Ghosh, Faculty Associate. Associate Professor, Department of History, Harvard University.

Contact:

Laura Flynn
lauraflynn@hks.harvard.edu

Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.

Chair:

Sheila JasanoffFaculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies; Professor of Environmental Science and Public Policy, Committee on Degrees in Environmental Science and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.

Abstract:

This talk explores China's role in emerging global small hydropower networks of the 1980s. Starting early in the decade, Chinese small hydropower expertise and technology traveled across the Global South, and even made its way to the United States. China also came to play an increasingly central role in a host of ambitious international small hydropower conferences—in places like Kathmandu, Nairobi, and Hangzhou. In this talk, I trace and contextualize this story, unpacking in the process how Chinese expertise was exported abroad and how it came to serve as a benchmark for global small hydropower projects.