Making & Doing History of Technology
A track at the Tensions of Europe Conference 2026, 8–10 July, Eindhoven
Historians make and do history far beyond conferences and peer-reviewed publications: in classrooms, museums, archives, exhibitions, collaborations, public debates, policy settings, creative projects, and community spaces. The Making & Doing track gives these practices a shared place at Tensions of Europe. Rather than simply showcasing the creative and experimental forms that historical practice can take, the programme creates space to reflect on methodological innovation and asks what such work does: how it changes the questions historians ask, the publics they engage, the materials they work with, and the futures their histories make imaginable. Taking seriously calls from a wide array of disciplines (van der Vleuten & de Hoop, 2025), the track exploress what happens when historical knowledge is not only communicated, but also performed, visualised, and co-created in experimental ways.
Departing from established conference formats, it uses the conference setting itself to position history as an active, creative, and socially embedded practice, inviting participants to explore, test, and reflect together on questions such as:
Situatedness: Which present-day issue does your work speak to, and how did that shape the histories you chose to work with?
Making & Doing starts from the idea that historical knowledge does not simply “speak to” the present from a distance; when historians select and frame a topic, they mobilise the past, which in turn determines a problem space in the present. It is key that we ask ourselves how we situate both our work and ourselves as historians in relation to present problems.
Experimentation: How do your methods, formats, materials or collaborations make historical knowledge active in the present?
Making & Doing treats historical practice not only as a way of representing the past, but also as a repertoire of perspectives, materials, and methods for thinking with the present. Through exhibitions, performances, workshops, objects, images, walks, stories, and other formats, historical knowledge becomes something that people can encounter, handle, test, reinterpret, and use to open different possible relations between pasts, presents, and futures.
Learning: What becomes visible, thinkable, learnable, or crucially, desirable for whom, when we experiment with the past in the present?
Experimenting with pasts in the present allows us to ask not only what history can teach others, but also what historians themselves learn when their work enters public, collaborative, and contested settings. Such experiments can make visible new questions, attachments, silences, frictions, and responsibilities, and can help us rethink what historical knowledge is, who it is for, and what it might make possible.
During the conference, we will keep these questions alive through a low-threshold shared reflection space, to be announced at the opening session of the conference. The contributions to the Making & Doing sessions range from re-enactment experiments and exhibitions to workshops, walking tours, films, artistic collaborations, performances, digital platforms, and hands-on demonstrations. There will be dedicated exhibition space in the lobby of the Atlas building next to the reception desk.
Overview of Making and Doing sessions
| Engaging Publics: Exhibitions, Media & Storytelling | |||
| Bicycles Forever: Making and Doing History | Exhibition | Continuous | Atlas lobby |
| Bicycles Forever: Making and Doing History | Panel discussion | Tba. | Tba. |
| Graphic Histories of Technology: Making Comics | Workshop | Wednesday 8 July, 12.15–15.30 | Atlas -1.822 |
| Keeping/Discarding | Multimedia exhibition | Continuous | Atlas lobby |
| Keeping/Discarding | Roundtable | Wednesday 8 July, 16.15–17.45 | Atlas -1.820 |
| SOY BEINGS: A Fragile Choreography of Coexistence | Video presentation and discussion | Installation: Continuous
Discussion: Friday 10 July, 14.00–15.30 |
Atlas lobby |
| Interactive Methods & Experimental Practices | |||
| Exploring visual meaning in past and present photography: A “Visual Legacies” Workshop | Workshop | Thursday 9 July, 9.00-10.30 | Atlas -1.820 |
| Creating engaging histories – an interactive walking tour about stuff and creative writing | Interactive walking tour | Thursday 9 July, 13.30-15.00 | Start at reception desk |
| Making past infrastructure visions usable today | Workshop | Friday 10 July, 10.45–12.15 | Atlas -1.820 |
| Mobilising the Past for Futures & Policy | |||
| Digital Alternative Mobility Monitor: Mapping Infrastructural Tensions in Europe’s Mobility Transition | Workshop | Wednesday 8 July, 16.15–17.45 | Atlas -1.822 |
| Mobilising technological pasts in rethinking science and technology museums in the context of today’s sustainability crises? | Workshop | Thursday 9 July, 10.45–12.15 | Atlas -1.822 |
| Discussion Café: From Energy History to Policy | Discussion Café | Thursday 9 July, 13.30–15.00 | Atlas -1.822 |
| Company Heritage and the Making of Regional Identities and Futures: The example of Brainport Region | Roundtable | Thursday 9 July, 13.30–15.00 · | Atlas 0.820 |
| Company Heritage and the Making of Regional Identities and Futures: The example of Brainport Region | Guided museum tour | Thursday 9 July, 16.30 | Start at Atlas lobby |
| Co-Creation, Collaboration & Reflexivity | |||
| Conference-wide reflective exercise for the Making & Doing Track | Cross-cutting activity | continuous | |
| Dialoguing through time | Talkshow format | Friday 10 July, 9.00–10.30 | Atlas -1.820 |
| Setting the Agenda for Making and Doing History (of Technology) | Reflective session | Friday 10 July, 15.45–17.15 | Atlas -1.820 |
Engaging Publics: Exhibitions, Media & Storytelling
These contributions explore how historical knowledge becomes public through media, exhibition, performance, and visual storytelling. Rather than treating communication as the final step after research has been completed, they approach formats such as exhibitions, comics, video, dance, and digital storytelling as ways of producing historical meaning. Together, the sessions ask how publics encounter, interpret, and reshape histories when those histories are made visible, tangible, narrative, or embodied.
Bicycles Forever: Making and Doing History (Exhibition)
Organizer: Ruth Oldenziel (TU Eindhoven)
The Bicycles Forever: Making and Doing History exhibit explores cycling as a technological, social, and political practice across African cities and beyond. Developed as part of the broader Cycling Cities project, the exhibit combines visual installations, bicycles, photographs, interviews, video material, and interactive elements to present cycling histories from cities including African cities Dar es Salaam, Kisumu, Tamale, Kisumu, Zomba as well as Lisbon, Tehran, and Eindhoven.
Presented within the Making & Doing History of Technology track, the exhibit foregrounds not only historical research outcomes, but also the collaborative methods through which the project was developed. The installation highlights engagements with local communities, researchers, artists, NGOs, and governmental and international stakeholders, including collaborations linked to UNEP and other urban mobility initiatives.
The exhibit invites participants to reflect on cycling infrastructures, everyday mobility practices, repair cultures, sustainability transitions, and the global circulation of urban mobility knowledge. By combining academic research with material culture and participatory formats, the exhibit seeks to open discussion on how histories of cycling can contribute to contemporary debates on inclusive and sustainable urban futures.
Alongside the core exhibit, we are exploring several optional interactive and demonstrative formats, including demonstrations related to bicycle construction and repair practices (Zomba firewood bicycle); a reassembly demonstration of a Kenyan boda boda bicycle/motorcycle hybrid; platform demonstration of prototype; a participatory board game sessions connected to urban mobility themes; short video and platform presentations documenting project collaborations and local cycling initiatives; stakeholder contributions connected to the Tehran and Lisbon cycling experiences. These formats are intended to strengthen audience interaction and foreground the practical and collaborative dimensions of the project.
Bicycles Forever: Making and Doing History (Panel Discussion)
Chair: Ruth Oldenziel (TU Eindhoven)
Panelists:
Dorcas Nthoki (Nairobi)
David Drengk (Malawi, online)
Luisa Sousa (Lisbon)
Yaqoub Azadehdel (Tehran)
The dedicated session accompanying the Bicycles Forever: Making and Doing History exhibition focuses on the making of the project and its broader implications for global cycling histories and sustainable mobility debates. Bringing together project collaborators from Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, the panel reflects on the development of the exhibit and the broader Cycling Cities: The Global Experience initiative, addressing questions of collaborative research, stakeholder engagement, and public-facing scholarship.
The session explores how cycling histories can contribute to contemporary urban agendas and examines the role of exhibitions, visual storytelling, and participatory formats in connecting academic research with wider audiences. Particular attention will be given to transnational collaboration, local mobility experiences, and the ways cycling knowledge circulates across different urban and political contexts.
Graphic histories of Technology: Making Comics
Wednesday 8 July
12.15–15.30
Room: Atlas -1.820
Organizers: Stefan Krebs (University of Luxembourg), and Andreas Fickers (University of Luxembourg)
Abstract:
In recent years, comics have gained increasing attention within the historical profession. They offer a powerful visual lens on scientific and technological developments and thus reveal much about the periods in which they were produced—often addressing topics that are only sparsely documented in traditional archival sources. At the same time, comics are a prominent medium of scientific and technological imagination, promoting visions of future worlds shaped by fantastic inventions and futuristic scenarios. In academia, the production of comics or graphic novels has also become a popular means of reaching broader audiences. While classic comics primarily address younger readers, graphic novels often target a more adult readership.
Translating historical scholarship into graphic narratives is not a straightforward process. The visual language of comics operates differently from written historical discourse and requires the inclusion of visual details that are rarely mentioned in historical sources. At the same time, graphic histories can fill the gaps and silences encountered in the archives. But how far can the fictionalisation of graphic narratives go without turning into “speculative history”? Nevertheless, graphic storytelling can enable the production of affective histories that are rarely articulated in conventional scholarly writing. The complex interrelation of visual and textual elements, as well as the possibility of “jumping” across time and space, makes storytelling in comics and graphic novels a challenging yet highly creative exercise. It encourages historians to reflect on multi-temporalities and on the translation of abstract concepts into personae and historical archetypes.
In this Making & Doing session, we will first offer a brief introduction to graphic histories of technology, drawing on our own experiences in producing comics and graphic novels. We will then invite participants to engage in a hands-on exercise that explores how their own research might be translated into comics. Which personae could appear in a graphic history? What would the world in which the story unfolds look like? What kind of plot could drive the curiosity of readers or students? How might factual and fictional storytelling be combined? In the final part of the session, participants will present and discuss their ideas with one another.
Keeping/Discarding: Multimedia exhibition and roundtable
Wednesday 8 July
16.15–17.45
Room: Atlas -1.820
Organizer: Kamila Krakowska Rodrigues (Leiden University)
Panelists:
Sanne Rotmeijer (Leiden University Centre for the Arts)
Bram Ieven,(Leiden University)
Abstract:
What do we keep? What do we discard? And does the answer to these questions change in a digital archival environment? A story or an object becomes ‘archivable’ when it holds a meaning for an individual or a community, sparking an affective reaction that binds the past to the present and opens up a communal future. Keeping/Discarding is a multimedia exhibition used to explore the possibilities of digital storytelling and visualisation to rethink some of the premises of (vernacular) archives and creative engagements with archives and their records. Several contributors to this digital repository of stories inspired by archives and their blind spots join the roundtable to discuss the creation and curation process and reflect upon the reciprocal influence between the medium, the maker, and their (historical) users in turning objects into meaningful stories and alternative histories
“SOY BEINGS: A Fragile Choreography of Coexistence”
Friday 10 July
14.00–15.30
Atlas -1.820
Organizers: Nathaly Yumi da Silva (TU Eindhoven)
Abstract:
SOY BEINGS is a video article presenting an interdisciplinary exploration at the intersection of Arts and Environmental History, examining the socio-cultural–environmental expansion of soybeans in Brazil through the medium of dance. The video article will form part of the conference exhibition, inviting viewers into a conversation about embodiment and experimental forms of research presentation. Nathaly, the researcher behind the project, will be present for questions and exchanges during her allocated timeslot (Friday 10 July, 14:00-15:30) and welcomes exchanges around the work and its methodology: Have you ever imagined your research being choreographed? How might an abstract concept be translated into movement? Visitors are invited to share impressions, methodological reflections, and thoughts on new ways of sensing, communicating, and performing research.
The methodology of SOY BEINGS emerges from this broader inquiry into how research can be translated, sensed, and communicated through movement. The project unfolds through co-creation laboratories in which the researcher collaborates with a dancer to transform field-collected materials into performative inputs. Textual notes, audiovisual recordings, and sensory observations function as archival traces that are reactivated through movement. Rather than reproducing data, the dancer engages with these materials to generate alternative interpretations, allowing emergent movements to exceed the immediacy of the original encounters. In this process, the body operates as a site where past experiences are stored, re-enacted, and continuously reshaped.
Audiovisual recordings of landscapes, humans, and nonhumans encountered during fieldwork form the choreographic core of the work. Recorded bodily gestures are reenacted until mechanical repetition opens into new movement possibilities, while field-recorded sounds and spoken interview fragments are layered into the audio composition, modulating movement through rhythm, speed, and cultural resonance. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the virtual and André Lepecki’s understanding of the body as an archive, the project positions dance as a generative mode of inquiry that brings together embodied memory, unrealised potentialities, presence, and speculation within the relations shaped by soybean cultivation.
Interactive Methods & Experimental Practices
These contributions invite participants to work with historical knowledge through interpretation, movement, visual analysis, walking, and writing. Rather than presenting method as something fixed in advance, they explore how historical understanding emerges through practical exercises: analysing past infrastructure visions, annotating and intervening in photographs, and experimenting with narrative form in relation to objects and places. Together, the sessions ask what happens when participants do not only discuss historical methods, but actively test, adapt, and reflect on them in the conference setting.
Exploring visual meaning in past and present photography: A “Visual Legacies” Workshop
Thursday 9 July
09.00-10.30
Atlas -1.820
Organizers: Lise Zurné (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Charlotte Bruns (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Sandra Khor Manickam (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Abstract:
The “Visual Legacies” project is a collaboration between three scholars at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication who are interested in the interplay between visual cultures today and in the past. We seek to interrogate what we know of the past through documentary evidence like photography; how photographs were part of colonial power structures in which colonizer and colonized took part in; and asks how historical photographs continue to circulate in the present in ways that reproduce old stereotypes and feed into new ones. In this workshop the participants will discuss historical and present-day images and perform a hands-on analysis based on Roswitha Breckner’s Segment Analysis and Nurul Huda Rashid’s Annotation. We will explore how meaning is brought to photographs and to add and contest different layers of expression. Finally, we will reflect on what working with historical – and in many cases contested photographs – means for our relation to both the medium and the depicted persons. This is especially relevant for this workshop, as the chosen analytical methods make use of cutting up and writing on images. These interventions, which carry a destructive element, will be reflected on with the participants.
Creating engaging histories – an interactive walking tour about stuff and creative writing
Thursday 9 July
13.30-15.00
Start at reception desk
Organizers: Louise Karlskov Skyggebjerg (Copenhagen Business School), Anders Ravn Sørensen (Copenhagen Business School)
Abstract:
In anniversary publications, historians of technology usually present a bunch of facts bound together in a narrative beginning with the founding of the business. Thus, a tale of growth and success is created with the founder and managers as protagonists. Such contractual publications can be a gold mine of information. But when was the last time you felt engaged during reading? Are such publications bound to be dry, solemn, and based on a positivist epistemology? Or can we take inspiration from the novelists and create engaging narratives that bring the reader closer to the events?
Walking around campus, we discuss creative writing and ways of playing with methods and form with an outset in a book project celebrating the 200-years of an iron merchant. In the project, we look for non-human actors as protagonists and invite our fantasy into the project, deliberately challenging the border between history and fiction. One chapter begins with an anchor found as wreckage near the home of the founder, a ship captain from the island Bornholm. Another begins with an iron girder causing a tram accident, placing the company in a busy, modernized city hungry for iron after the Great War. The protagonist in yet another chapter is the sheet piling providing safety for drivers on a highway since 1972. The questions we want to discuss are: Are we writing the most boring book ever about an iron merchant selling stairs, steel reinforcement, elevators, aluminium for beer cans, and other mundane objects? Or can we create rich scenes that let readers sense the past, hear the typewriters, and smell the cigars listed in the yearly accounts – and perhaps even perceive the present differently? What are your suggestions, experiences, and dreams of playing with the genre?
Making past infrastructure visions usable today
Friday 10 July
10.45–12.15
Atlas -1.820
Organizer: Timothy Moss (Humboldt University of Berlin)
Abstract:
This event engages participants in an interactive experiment about how infrastructure visions have been developed in response to crises in the past, using original visual material (historical maps, graphs, photos, posters etc.) from Berlin’s infrastructure history to elicit reflection on the consequences and limitations of past imaginaries for infrastructural resilience. Participants will work in groups to interpret the materials presented with the help of guiding questions and a PESTEL analysis but otherwise no prior prompts, reporting back on what they learned from the exercise and its potential relevance for today’s infrastructural visioning. Documentation of similar exercises conducted with stakeholders and students in Berlin will be provided to stimulate a subsequent discussion of methods used to mobilize history in interactive and generative ways, with participants encouraged to reflect on their own experiences of engaging with practitioners about technology and infrastructure pasts, presents and futures.
Mobilising the Past for Futures & Policy
These contributions explore how histories of technology can enter arenas of policy, sustainability, institutional reflection, and societal transformation. Rather than treating the past as background context, they ask how historical objects, infrastructures, organisations, and energy systems can become resources for decision-making, critique, and future-oriented debate.
Digital Alternative Mobility Monitor (DMM): Mapping Infrastructural Tensions in Europe’s
Wednesday 8 July
16.15–17.45
Atlas -1.822
Organizer: Simone Fari (University of Granada)
Abstract:
The Digital Alternative Mobility Monitor (DMM) is an open online platform that documents mobility transitions through short, citable narratives supported by a small set of indicators, focusing on “infrastructural tensions” in Europe’s mobility transition: how infrastructures and services enable connection and integration while also producing frictions, exclusions, and uneven outcomes. This Making & Doing session is a guided prototype demo plus a structured user-testing exercise. After a brief walkthrough of the DMM demo and its contribution model, participants act as “testers”: they are invited to imagine and describe how they would contribute to DMM (for instance by joining a stakeholder panel for the first Pulse and/or by drafting a Story about a policy shift, infrastructural intervention, contested street space, or a “failed” experiment). Contributions are collected in-session as mock entries/storyboards (the platform is not yet publicly open), allowing us to assess clarity, feasibility, and incentives. We close with a round of remarks and feedback to refine the near-term European pilot (comparability vs. context, multilinguality/translation, governance and ethics). Participants leave with an exportable storyboard of cases and a practical pilot checklist/roadmap.
Mobilising technological pasts in rethinking science and technology museums in the context of today’s sustainability crises?
Thursday 9 July
10.45–12.15
Atlas -1.822
Organizer: Jacob Thorek Jensen (University of Copenhagen), Mads Kring (Danish Museum of Science & Technology), Mikkel Høghøj (Danish Museum of Science and Technology)
Abstract:
In European science and technology museums today, visitors encounter objects and exhibitions that give testimony to humans’ unique ability to change our surroundings, for better or for worse. Still, many exhibitions remain rooted in Western, human-centred conceptions of “modernity” and “progress”, celebrating the technologies and scientific developments that have contributed to today’s intertwined sustainability crises.
This workshop is based on experimental practices from the Danish Museum of Science and Technology: The museum is currently in the process of relocating to a new site: a decommissioned combined heat and power plant in Copenhagen, Svanemølleværket. This process raises broader questions: how might science and technology museums and their collections be rethought in the context of today’s sustainability crises? And if we are to depart from our current trajectory and imagine new and more sustainable futures, what roles may technologies of the past play in such transformations?
In this workshop, you are invited to explore the potential of rethinking technological pasts – and historical practices more broadly – in shaping possible futures. Drawing on concrete historical objects, we will collectively think about how technologies of the past might be mobilised in new and unexpected ways, both in terms of narratives and formats. Rather than approaching objects primarily as representations of a finished past, this workshop explores how they can be mobilised as thinking mechanisms or tools in envisioning sustainable futures. Join us and take part in shaping new ways of thinking with and through historical objects.
Discussion Café: From Energy History to Policy
Thursday 9 July
13.30–15.00
Atlas -1.822
Organizers: Anna Åberg (Chalmers University of Technology), Michiel Bron (Tilburg University), Vincent Lagendijk (Rathenau Institute and Maastricht University), Odinn Melsted (Maastricht University)
Abstract:
This discussion session will deal with the question how historians of technology, particularly those working on energy, can and should engage with policy and policymakers. While research in energy history often aims to contribute to contemporary debates and energy policy in one way or another, it often remains unclear how exactly historians can and should contribute to policy debates effectively. How useful are publication forms like white papers and policy briefs in communicating insights from history? What do policymakers and policy research actually want or need from historians? What kinds of impact can a historian have and who can he/she speak for? What can historians reveal about the role of various interest groups and citizens in policy processes? And are there potential pitfalls to historians entering policy debates? This session will take the form of an interactive discussion café, with participants moving between tables chaired by the facilitators to discuss those questions.
Company Heritage and the Making of Regional Identities and Futures: The example of Brainport Region
Thursday 9 July
13.30–15.00
Atlas 0.820
Organizers: Jonas van der Straeten (TU Eindhoven), Frank Veraart (TU Eindhoven)
Panelists:
Freek Janssen (Philips Museum)
Sergio Derks (Philips Heritage Organization)
Mila Davids (TU Eindhoven)
Eric Berkers (ASML) (tbc.)
Abstract
Bringing together a group of practitioners of company heritage working in Eindhoven’s large tech companies, this session approaches company heritage not simply as an object of historical analysis, but as an active practice of engagement and co-production. It thus focuses not only on what company histories represent, but also on what they do: how they shape regional imaginaries, influence public debates, support institutional legitimacy, and participate in defining pathways of technological transition. Focusing particularly on the Brainport Eindhoven region as both conference host and empirical case study, the session investigates how histories of companies become mobilized in contemporary debates on innovation, regional transition, urban branding, and economic development. In regions strongly shaped by industrial and technological development, company histories often become more than institutional memory: they function as shared cultural resources through which regions narrate their identity, continuity, and future ambitions. Narratives about the region remain deeply intertwined with the histories of Philips and, increasingly, with the global semiconductor networks associated with ASML and Brainport’s connections to places such as Taiwan.
To explore how company heritage contributes to the making of regional identities and technological future, the panel will explore practical and methodological approaches of professionals working in companies, museums, and academia. Panelists will discuss questions of preservation and accessibility of industrial archives and collections; the role of exhibitions, storytelling, and digital media in engaging publics; the tensions between critical historiography and promotional narratives; and the politics involved in deciding which pasts become visible, usable, and valuable in the present.
The session will be complemented by a guided visit to the Philips Museum after the end of the official program, on Thursday 9 July 2026, 16.30 – as well as the social event in the evening of Friday 10 July in the Ketelhuis, a part of Eindhoven’s industrial heritage landscape.
Co-Creation, Collaboration & Reflexivity
These contributions turn Making & Doing back onto itself by asking how historians collaborate, co-produce knowledge, and position themselves when historical work enters contemporary settings. Rather than treating engagement as a neutral method, they explore the tensions, disagreements, responsibilities, and learning processes that emerge when pasts are mobilised with and for others. Together, the sessions ask how historians can reflect on their own roles while experimenting with forms of dialogue, agenda-setting, and collective reflection.
Conference-Wide Reflective Exercise for the Making & Doing Track
Organizers: Jonas van der Straeten (TU Eindhoven), Evelien de Hoop (VU Amsterdam), Sjamme van de Voort (VU Amsterdam)
Abstract
This contribution is an ongoing reflective activity that runs across the Making & Doing track. Throughout the conference, participants will be invited to share short observations, questions, examples, or moments from the sessions they attend. These contributions will help keep the track’s guiding questions alive: how historical work becomes situated in present-day issues, how methods and formats make historical knowledge active, and what can be learned when pasts are experimented with in the present.
The exercise is deliberately low-threshold. Participants may contribute through a shared reflection space, to be introduced during the conference, and through moments of collective discussion during the track. The aim is not to define in advance what Making & Doing history of technology is, but to explore it through the practices gathered at the conference: exhibitions, workshops, performances, walking tours, digital platforms, discussion cafés, and other experimental formats.
The reflections gathered during the conference will help the organisers and participants think across the different sessions and identify recurring questions, tensions, and possibilities. They may also form the basis for a post-conference reflection or publication on the Making & Doing track as an experiment in making historical knowledge active, public, and collectively discussable.
Dialoguing though time
Friday 10 July
9.00–10.30
Atlas -1.820
Organizers: Evelien de Hoop (VU Amsterdam), Sjamme van de Voort (VU Amsterdam), Moniek Driesse (University of Antwerp)
Much transdisciplinary research, in all its diversity, seeks to address problems in the present or foreseen in the future through knowledge co-production by scholars and other actors. In this framing, the “past” tends to be absent, (under)analysed, or otherwise backgrounded (Hölscher et al., 2018; e.g. as a footnote that marks where trouble began, as in Oomen, 2023; Pohl & Hirsch Hadorn, 2008; as a fixed canvas against which current problems play out; also see recent flagship transdisciplinary research handbooks and guidelines, such as Regeer et al., 2024). In contrast, historians have long occupied themselves with the pasts of the very issues that transdisciplinary research teams now seek to address, but predominantly in isolation from those present-day issues. Those historians who speak to contemporary concerns generally refrain from engaging with their addressees, relying on conventional one-directional modes of knowledge exchange in texts and talks.
While the foregoing certainly does not do justice to all of History of Technology’s wide variety of work and approaches, we recognize that work which does actively, and selectively, mobilize pasts to engage with contemporary issues and crises has been limited – and is contested. Indeed, such work comes with fundamental challenges that are methodological, conceptual and normative in nature.
This session explores a number of these challenges through short dialogues between scholars who mobilize historical knowledge in contemporary transdisciplinary research contexts in a variety of ways. Each dialogue is structured either through disagreement between the conversation partners or through joint exploration of a contentious issue.
Setting the Agenda for Making and Doing History (of Technology)
Organizers: Evelien de Hoop (VU Amsterdam), Sjamme van de Voort (VU Amsterdam), Jonas van der Straeten (TU Eindhoven)
This closing work session brings the Making & Doing track together by asking what has been opened up across the conference. Throughout the track, contributors experiment with exhibitions, workshops, performances, walking tours, digital platforms, discussion cafés, and other formats that make historical knowledge active, public, and collectively discussable. This session takes those experiments as a starting point for a shared conversation about what Making & Doing history of technology might mean, what it adds to existing forms of historical scholarship, and what questions it raises for future work.
Rather than defining Making & Doing in advance, the session invites participants to reflect on what has become visible through the track itself. How were pasts mobilised in relation to present-day issues? How did different formats, materials, collaborations, and publics shape the histories being made? What kinds of learning, friction, responsibility, or possibility emerged when historical knowledge moved beyond conventional academic presentation?
The session will draw on observations from the conference-wide reflective exercise, the exhibition space, and the individual sessions. Together, participants will identify recurring themes, tensions, and agenda points for further developing Making & Doing history of technology as a field of practice, reflection, and debate. In this sense, the session functions both as a closing reflection on the track and as an opening move towards future conversations, collaborations, and possible post-conference outputs.