Response, Adaptation, and Resistance to Technology
Immanuel Kant said that the two great questions in life are, first, What can I know? and, second, What ought I do? What we can know is how our present world came to be, and that requires a knowledge of the development of technology and of its interactions with culture and society… But we also have a mission in relation to the second of Kant’s great questions-What ought we do with our knowledge?
…if ours is truly a man-made world, I claim that mankind can re-make it. And in that remaking process, the history of technology can play a very important role in enabling us to meet the challenges besetting mankind now and in the future.
-Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws’” (1986)
The speech by Melvin Kranzberg quoted above, originally a Presidential Address to the Society for the History of Technology, has received a great deal of attention in the recent discourse around generative AI, but most citations of Kranzberg begin and end with the speech’s most famous aphorism: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” Less often recognized is the call to action quoted above, which Kranzberg poses to his fellow historians of technology at the end of his speech, and which we would like to extend to all of our fellow humanists. As the cycles of innovation, implementation, and proliferation grow faster, we often experience new technologies as things that happen to us, rather than tools we use, resist, or refuse consciously and deliberately. A crucial role of the humanities is to help us find the contexts and understanding that allow us to move beyond these feelings of helplessness and passivity so we can respond meaningfully to the changes around us.
This faculty research seminar will explore ways that the humanities, and the work of humanists in general, can help us respond to technological change by understanding the ways that technology shapes our lives and cultures. If technology is “the active human interface with the material world,” as Ursula K. LeGuin has claimed, how does our relationship with technology define, challenge, and complicate what it means to be human? How do we make ethical decisions about our use of technology? How do we even recognize our use of technology as a series of choices? What does it mean to resist large-scale technological innovations, and how can we make such resistance meaningful?
The ongoing debates around technologies such as social media and artificial intelligence give these questions an obvious relevance, but they are by no means new questions for the humanities. From Phaedrus to Frankenstein, from the Surrealists to the Afrofuturists, from the printing press to the internet, the history of the humanities is inextricably intertwined with the history of technology. Because of this relationship, the humanities can and should serve an essential role in the ways we come to understand moments of profound technological change and the ways we, as individuals, institutions, and cultures, mitigate the inevitable costs that accompany them. This seminar will seek to explore these questions–and many others–through a broad, interdisciplinary discussion of our own work. A handful of shared readings, chosen by the group as a whole, will frame the initial discussions, but as the year unfolds, we will focus primarily on the research interests and developing projects of the seminar participants.
We welcome participants at all stages of their research, from nascent projects to extensions of long-running research interests. Projects might consider the impacts of technology on the practice of humanities research (e.g. the effects of digitization on manuscript research) or take a moment of technological change as the subject of research (e.g. a study of the Luddite movement), or consider how technology has or should affect the theories that inform humanities research (e.g. the contemporary relevance of Media or Science and Technology Studies frameworks). As a group, we will likely consider ways that our readings and research can speak to current issues like the impact of generative AI, but individual projects do not need to have a contemporary focus or offer a direct application to contemporary issues.
2025-26 Seminar Directors:
George Cusack, Director of Writing Across the Curriculum and Senior Lecturer in English
Austin Mason, Director of Digital Arts & Humanities and Lecturer in History, will pursue a project that attempts to bridge the apparent gap between his core research area of early medieval European history and the twenty-first-century technologies of digital humanities methods. He will work on an article that explores adaptation and resistance to technology, defined capaciously, by applying the chaîne opératoire framework common in archaeology to contemporary digital projects, in conversation with the maker vs. craft debate in Digital Humanities discourse.
Faculty Fellows
Antony Adler, Lecturer in History, is launching a project to explore how technology and visions of its future applications shaped the field of marine physiology. His research will center on Per Frederik Scholander (1905-1980) and his colleagues at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Adler aims to investigate how Scholander’s studies on human and marine mammal physiology, conducted from the 1950s to the 1970s, were influenced by military and scientific interests in advancing exploration and adaptation to extreme environments. The project will also examine the development of scientific instruments for physiological research and the creation and use of experimental aquarium tanks by Scholander’s team.
Ryan Eichberger, Assistant Professor of English (St. Olaf), will research written and visual rhetoric: the way the design of media obliges living things to respond in some way. He will write an article about how societies grapple with technological revolution, focusing on transitions in photographic history from the early days of the camera to our contemporary period of artificial intelligence. Working from Deborah Bird Rose’s warning that “catastrophe inheres in processes of destructive disconnection,” his work will draw conclusions about how emergent technologies alter or threaten relations between humans and the more-than-human world—and how such periods of crisis can best be navigated.
Jennifer Shaiman, Assistant Professor of English (St. Olaf), will begin research for a project that builds off her previous work on the performance of identity in literary domestic spaces. “Playing House” will examine player-decorated domestic spaces in online, multiplayer games. It will explore the ways in which inherently performative domestic spaces change when the creator is already engaged in playing an identity, and how this intersects with the traditionally gendered game spaces in which they are creating a home.
Cheryl Yin, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, will draft her book manuscript, Language & Morality: Being Modern in Early 21st Century Cambodia, which reveals competing concerns Cambodians have over the future of the Khmer language in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-79). Specifically, she will complete one chapter that focuses on the large amount of linguistic criticism media personalities face. Owing to the media’s popularity and the poor quality of education, this chapter argues that Cambodians scrutinize the language of media personalities because they fear that “incorrect” language-use will be copied and spread across the country by the masses.