Amy Slaton, Drexel University
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Brown Bag Lecture
Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation
Information: 215-873-8289 or bbl@chemheritage.org
From President Obama’s State of the Union to small town economic strategies, high-tech innovation has lately become a watchword of optimistic planners seeking a way out of the nation’s lingering recession. With hopes of renewed global economic dominance, and new jobs for many disadvantaged American communities, boosters invoke the historic role of science and technology as sources of U.S. industrial might. But a close look at the labor patterns that actually accompany high-tech scale-up, including automation and outsourcing, casts doubt on these projections. How, we might ask, do science and technology continue to enlist uncritical support as sources of collective good in spite of these less than promising outlooks?
Amy Slaton is an associate professor of history at Drexel University. She is the author of Race, Rigor and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering: The History of an Occupational Color-Line, and is now writing about historical American ideas of skill and opportunity in high-tech industries.