New Faculty Research and Editorship of the Humanities and Technology Review Awarded to St. Thomas Faculty Member
Dr. Evan Lampe and Dr. Darrell Arnold, from St. Thomas’s Department of History, Philosophy, and Global Studies, attended the 2011 annual conference of the Humanities and Technology Association at Bowie State University in Bowie, Maryland from October 13th to October 15. The title of this year’s conference was “Technology and the Human Dimensions.” This national conference featured about 50 presentations from scholars throughout the U.S. and Canada in panels on such diverse topics as “The State, the Law and Technology to the Benefit of Humanity,” “Women and Technology: Past Present and Future,” and “Humanity, Technology, and Horror: The Warnings in Literature.” Dr. Lampe’s paper, “The Institution and Its Enemies in the Short Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick,” was based on a lecture he prepared in Spring 2011 for Dr. Frank Sicius’s honors seminar at St. Thomas. It explores Dick’s suspicions of technologies because of their potential to interfere with a good life rather than contribute to one. Yet it is not just the specific technologies that contain this negative potential, but the mindset of a technological civilization more generally; this results in a technocratic design of human institutions whereby we all too often come to serve the instruments that were meant to serve us. As an alternative to a life in accord with dominating and centrally controlled technologies and technocratic institutions, Dr. Lampe proposes taking seriously the ideas of Murry Bookchin to increasingly rely on local and appropriate technologies and exert more local control over institutional design.
Dr. Arnold’s paper, “On New Consumer Activism and Fair Trade,” has developments in technology as a theoretical backdrop. Since modern technologies have increasingly eased international exchange, rendering traditional barriers of time and space less important than they were in the past, raw materials, labor power, and technologies for production can be easily moved beyond their traditional geographic boundaries. This has facilitated global regimes of power and global exploitation. Dr. Arnold explores the new consumer activist movements that have arisen in this context, in particular focusing on the fair trade movement and highlighting the tension that has emerged within it as fair trade certification has increasingly been granted not only to small-scale cooperatives, such as the one that St. Thomas supports in its work with Café Cocano, but also larger scale farms with traditional hierarchical forms of ownership. Dr. Arnold argues that while support of the small-scale farmer cooperatives in particular can serve to improve working conditions of producers in poor countries and even strengthen participatory and economic democracy, in the end this movement must be linked to attempts to change international economic agreements if it hopes to secure “fair trade for all.” This paper is planned as part of a larger work in which Dr. Arnold examines in more detail the various new forms of consumer activism and focuses specifically on St. Thomas’s work with fair trade initiatives in Haiti and the work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.
At the 2011 association meeting Dr. Arnold was also nominated for and accepted the position as editor-in-chief of the thirty-year-old association journal, The Humanities and Technology Review.