Tuesday 13th April 2010, 5.00pm
Arts Lecture Theatre, New Arts Faculty Building


Infernal Machines: Towards a History of Technology of Terrorisms

Seminar by

Dr Mats Fridlund, Associate Professor, Centre for Advanced Security Theory (CAST), Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen

Dr Mats Fridlund is an historian of science and technology who has previously held positions at Northwestern University, Imperial College London, MIT, University of Manchester, University of Aarhus, Technical University of Denmark, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), and Linköping University. His research focus on technopolitics and the connections between ideology and technology. He currently works on three projects on the interaction between technology and terrorism: a first on how a number of international cities have developed and taken into use various technologies to cope with various man-made terror threats during the 20th century; a second project on the media construction of the bioterrorism threat 1994-2010, and third project focusing on what role technological expertise, innovation, and appropriation of played in the emergence and global spread of modern terrorism at the end of the 19th century.

Abstract
Terrorism has been as much a product of technologies as of ideologies, of infernal machines as well as incendiary words. Common to the non-state terrorism that emerged in the 19th century were the prevalence of participants with advanced technological and scientific expertise – engineers, midwives and doctors – and the appropriation of such advanced and commercial technologies as dynamite, revolvers, hectograph printing presses, as well as the illustrated mass press. The talk addresses the role of these and later technologies in shaping terrorism or even allowing it to emerge and whether—then as well as today—access to such materialities and expertise be seen as playing a defining role in the emergence of new forms of terrorism.