In Mexico, during the nineteenth century, the term “ mestizo” appeared powerfully in the political discourse as a symbol of identity in the formation of the Mexican nation state and as a homogenizing center of national identity. These images circulated widely in Europe and its colonies, influencing debates on race and the formation of national identities. Artists and scientists first gave visionary expression to the discourse on racial hierarchy in eighteenth century Europe, setting up a powerful apparatus for manifestations of exclusion, racism, and xenophobia. These new practices also allowed classical notions to be re-conceptualized, such as race, genetic variation, and natural and human populations.Įrica Torrens, in her paper, discerns the genealogy and shift of the concept of race and the racialization of Mexican bodies to show the resulting novel visual culture from the merge of genetic knowledge with the phenomenon of racism during the second half of the twentieth century in Mexico. New techniques and practices were developed within human heredity as a medical field, intended not only to characterize but also to understand differences among populations and their relation to the presence of certain diseases. In the aftermath of Second World War, biology and medicine also witnessed intensive developments that gave rise to the field of biomedicine. Through the work of physicist María Aránzazu Vigón, daughter of General Vigón, a minister in the first cabinet of the Franco regime, Romero not only highlights how historicizing the instruments sheds light on circulation and transnational collaborations, but also show how gender issues affected the circulation of radiation counters, as Vigón was responsible for studying the construction and workings of radioactivity counters in Spain. They were used by nuclear policy authorities to demonstrate political power. Instruments and techniques travelled along with agreements and contracts, changing laboratories, establishing research agendas, and making nuclear development more dynamic. According to the author, these instruments were used as mediators, establishing not only protocols on how to act inside and outside laboratories, but also networks of collaborations (Spain exchanged uranium for technical assistance), and participating in the making of nuclear energy and political power during the Franco regime. Ana Romero’s paper is a reflection on instruments that circulated and travelled between Spain and Italy (radioactivity counters), and on the political power of these two nations in a world convulsed by the bipolarity that was established at the end of Second World War. In the early 1950s, in the wake of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, extensive research and experimentation occurred in physics and chemistry. The Cold War affected not only science and technology related to the military and space races, but also research in biomedicine and other fields. The papers in this dossier share the same study framework, seeing the Cold War as a global and plural phenomenon that shaped international, national, and local conditions and decisions for scientific work in light of the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. A remarkable expansion of state-funded medical science and military patronage of scientific work in the life sciences occurred during the Cold War in industrialized and developing countries. Little attention has been paid to developments during the Cold War, when the life sciences, public health, and politics intertwined, and donors and new and renewed bilateral and multilateral organizations played an important role in the organization and output of scientific work. However, most studies on transnational science have focused on the eighteenth century and on naturalists. This rich approach problematizes the notion of “international science” and addresses pending issues, such as the precise definition of notions like circulation, reception, adaptation, and creativity. This transnational approach abandons the nation as a unit of analysis, Eurocentric narratives, cultural-diffusion interpretations, and the rigid opposition of the categories “center” and “periphery” in order to explain the dynamics of transnational circuits and the global and local circulation of knowledge, people, instruments, and scientific practices ( Brown et al., 2006). The recent perspective in the history of science has emphasized the need to write transnational narratives based on a reciprocal treatment of global and local contexts ( Subrahmanyam, 1997).
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