We are pleased to invite you to a lecture in the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2023/2024 Spring semester

Jesse Olszynko-Gryn
(Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

The Invisible Designer: Meg Crane and the Invention of Home Pregnancy Testing in 1960s New York

Thursday, March 14, 2024
at 4:45 p.m.

You can get 3 OZN points for participating in this event.

Where?

Dobra 55, room 3.014
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)

FACEBOOK EVENT

Who?

Jesse Olszynko-Gryn is Head of the Laboratory for Oral History and Experimental Media at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He is the author of A Woman’s Right to Know: Pregnancy Testing in Twentieth-Century Britain (MIT Press, 2023), as well as articles and chapters on time lapse cinematography, science fiction cinema, feminist health activism, and contraceptive technologies.

What?

Following the advent of “the pill” and Roe v. Wade, the commercialisation of pregnancy testing contributed to a realignment of power dynamics between women and physicians in a tumultuous (and frequently mythologized) period of protest and revolution. Predictor, the pioneering home pregnancy test, was developed in New York in the late 1960s by Margaret “Meg” Crane, a young graphic designer working for the multinational pharmaceutical company Organon. Advertised as a “private little revolution”, Predictor was launched in Canada and Western Europe in 1971, but did not come to market in the US until 1978. Crane remained invisible until her decision to put the original prototype up for auction in 2016 garnered media attention. This talk historically contextualises Crane’s place in the design history and re-examines her invention story to reflect on a general question about “revolution” in American histories of science, technology, and medicine.

American Studies Colloquium Series

December 19: Between The Mundane and the Heroic: Vietnamese Presence in State Socialist Poland

December 16, 2024

We are delighted to invite you to the fifth lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2024/2025 Fall semester! This talk will examine the depictions of the (North) Vietnamese as freedom fighters within the context of the state socialist public sphere and the everyday life of Vietnamese students in Poland across generations. From idealized wartime reportages to mixed-race couples, the Vietnamese presence was marked by a multifaceted experience of adaptation, challenges, opportunities, and dynamic, interactive bonds with Polish society. This history continues to exert a profound influence on the contemporary Vietnamese diaspora and Polish-Vietnamese relationships.

Year 2024/2025

December 18: The Trump Transition – What is New and What is Not

December 14, 2024

Leadership Research Groupis inviting all those who would like to put the Trump transition to a presidential scholarship context and better understand the Trump transition decisions, the prospects for the future in domestic and foreign policy areas they bring, and the impact that Trump leadership may have on the political scene in Washington to a talk followed by a Q&A session by Professor Stephen Farnsworth.

Year 2024/2025

December 17: We Want Change NOW! The Feminist Manifesto in Theory and Practice

December 13, 2024

During the workshop “We Want Change NOW! The Feminist Manifesto in Theory and Practice”, Aleksandra Julia Malinowska, a doctoral candidate at the University of Warsaw,will delve into the history of feminist manifestos and their pivotal role in the women’s movement in the United States. We’ll explore how activists of the second wave of feminism used grassroots publications to raise awareness, voice the demands of emerging women’s groups, and build communication networks between organizations spread across the country. Together, we’ll analyze the literary techniques that make the manifesto genre a powerful tool for inspiring activist mobilization beyond the pages of the text.

American Studies Colloquium Series

December 12: Technological Imaginaries and the Universal Ambitions of Silicon Valley

December 12, 2024

Drawing on her new book, Appropriate, Negotiate, Challenge: Activist imaginaries and the politics of digital technologies (University of California Press), in this talk Ferrari shows how these discourses, which she calls “technological imaginaries”, shape how we experience digital technologies. She discusses how, for the past 30 years, Silicon Valley tech actors have produced and popularized a specific way of thinking about digital technologies, which has become mainstream. This dominant technological imaginary brings together technocratic aspirations and populist justifications. While arising out of the peculiarities of Silicon Valley and of the American 1990s, this dominant imaginary has posited its universality by presenting its tenets as if they were global, unbiased, and equally suitable for everyone, everywhere. She argues that to really curb the socio-political influence of Big Tech companies we also need to understand, critique, and resist the power of their technological imaginary.

News

ASC Library has received funding from the Social Responsibility of Science

December 12, 2024

ASC Library has received funding from the Social Responsibility of Science (SON) program — “Support for Scientific Libraries,” implemented by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education.