Ventricles

Jungle Laboratories

This episode concludes season one of Ventricles Podcast. We continue our series on politics in the history of technology in this episode. Professor Gabriela Soto Laveaga explains the central role that Mexico played in the creation of the birth control pill, a history that has often been told about a few people in the US. From Ernesto Miramontes, a Mexican scientist whose name is on the patent for a compound used in the first oral contraceptives, to Syntex, the company co-founded by chemist Russell Marker in Mexico City, Mexico takes center stage in the history of oral contraceptives. But what about the hundreds of thousands of peasants in the South of Mexico, who dug up and even manipulated the barbasco roots from which steroid hormones were being synthesized? And are the dense jungles from which they found and dug up tons of these wild barbasco roots a laboratory? Professor Laveaga discusses how this industry revolutionized the lives of the peasants in this region, and how they in turn enabled and shaped the history of the pill. Audio credits: Thanks as always to The Overseas Ensemble, a collaboration between composer Paed Conca and Sarigama, for use of their music

Cybernetic Revolutionaries

How are technologies shaped by political needs, and how do technologies enable new kinds of politics? In this episode, Professor Eden Medina tells the history of communications technologies in Chile, during the socialist government of Salvador Allende, in the early 1970s. She explains how the innovative cybernetics systems, Project Cybersyn, was employed by the central government to communicate with people and officials across the country in an unprecedented way. Finally, we discuss how important this system seemed to Chileans in a time of political turmoil and what it came to represent - not only to the government, but to to the people of Chile. Eden Medina [http://www.edenmedina.com] is associate professor of informatics and computing at Indiana University. She is the author of Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile and co-editor of Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America. Audio credits: Thanks as always to The Overseas Ensemble, a collaboration between composer Paed Conca and Sarigama, for use of their music

Why is There a History of Medicine?

If the human body has remained the same in the past few thousand years, why have our approaches to its treatment varied so much? How can an ailment exist in only one part of the world, and not another? Why do so many treatments in the history of Western medicine seem bizarre to us now? This episode with Professor Shigehisa Kuriyama is about many interesting questions in the history of medicine. Audio credits: Thanks as always to The Overseas Ensemble, a collaboration between composer Paed Conca and Sarigama, for use of their music Image credit: Surgeon and student performing Bloodletting on a man's arm from Rolandus Parmensis, Chirurgia, c.1300, Rome, Bibl. Casanatense MS 1382 fol. 20r., Wellcome Collection

Imagining Iraq

What will Iraq be like, 100 years in the future? How are Muslim women imagined in the future? In this episode, Professor Ahmed Ragab explores literary imaginaries of the future of the Middle East. He starts by discussing the story, Kahramana, from the recent short-story collection edited by Hassan Blasim, Iraq +100. He compares the story of Kahramana to the superhero, Dust from Marvel comics, to demonstrate how writers based in Iraq navigate and subvert the expectations of Western audiences. Audio credits: Thanks as always to The Overseas Ensemble, a collaboration between composer Paed Conca and Sarigama, for use of their music Image courtesy of Sara Alfaqeeh.

Canoes in Space

What can we learn about space exploration from Polynesian voyaging, or wayfinding? How does a frontier differ from a horizon? In this episode, Professor Eli Nelson explains the story of the Hokule‘a, a double-hulled voyaging canoe launched in 1975 to understand and recover the navigation techniques by which indigenous people found and settled the Pacific Islands. He touches on the various ways that people, from artists to authors of science fiction, have imagined voyaging canoes in the future, and in space. Audio credits: Thanks as always to The Overseas Ensemble, a collaboration between composer Paed Conca and Sarigama, for use of their music Images: Special thanks to Elizabeth LaPensée for letting us feature images of her work: Space Canoe, Returning, On Scrolls Carried by Canoe and Manoominike Mazinaanang Bibliography: Bio: Eli Nelson (Mohawk) is an assistant professor of American Studies at Williams College. He works on the history of Native science and Indigenous futurism and science fiction.