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Jennifer K. Alexander |
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| Ph.D., 1996, History, University of Washington M.A. 1990, B.S. 1988, History, University of Wyoming |
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I am a cultural historian with a special interest in modern industrial Europe. I believe historical study offers a tool for uncovering and critically examining the technological orthodoxies that increasingly dominate life in advanced societies. By nature I dislike orthodoxies. While they create complex and powerful technological systems, they also impose dogmas and require conformity. I have devoted my recent work to examining the orthodoxy of efficiency, a central component of modern industrial society. My work asks how people appealed to efficiency in order to extend to other people the dogmas of control that are commonplace and acceptable with machines. “Sport and Work” is my current book project. It analyzes the growth of the international human biomechanics movement in the period from 1925 through 1960, during which time eminence in the field switched from German researchers to American ones, largely as a result of German defeat in the Second World War. The history of biomechanics is little understood, and its connections to both labor productivity and sports performance have not yet been investigated. The history of human biomechanics shows how technological research was connected to personal experience, because it influenced how managers, coaches, athletes, and working people understood their bodies, and, more fundamentally, how they moved. It is a history of the intersection of technology and the personal body. The intersection of technology and religion also interests me. The historical relationship between science and religion has been extensively studied, but similar work on the history of technology and religion has been sparse. I have begun research on technology and ecumenism at the World Council of Churches in Europe following the Second World War. At the moment I am analyzing the contributions of Jacques Ellul, a prominent speaker at the first congress of the WCC, held in Amsterdam in 1948. Ellul was an eminent French critic of technology and also a jurist and lay theologian; he has for some time been a controversial figure in the history and philosophy of technology. This project investigates the juncture of technological and theological orthodoxies in a time of political and social tension. Teaching
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