Technology as a keyword

Abstract for my talk at the University of Toronto’s Geography Department next week:

Technology as a keyword

Abstract

While for centuries technology referred to a systematic study of the ‘practical arts’ – typically a technical manual or a kind of book –its usage has expanded dramatically so that today we think nothing of the same word being used to describe a massive hydro-power dam, a set of methods for building the dam, or the means of communication for a youth-based social movement against the dam; a specific piece of machinery or mechanical object or the totality of all of our collective means and capabilities.  Through a materialist keyword approach to the career of technology, in this talk I raise questions about what it means to think of things, processes, and relations as technological, and explore implications of the idea of technology – understood in terms of its integrative, meaning-making, cultural work – for the histories and geographies that we produce.