Krige J. (ed.) Knowledge Flows in a Global Age: A Transnational Approach

University of Chicago Press, 2022. — 368 p.A transnational approach to understanding and analyzing knowledge circulation.
The contributors to this collection focus on what happens to knowledge and know-how at national borders. Rather than treating it as flowing like currents across them, or diffusing out from center to periphery, they stress the human intervention that shapes how knowledge is processed, mobilized, and repurposed in transnational transactions to serve diverse interests, constraints, and environments. The chapters consider both what knowledge travels and how it travels across borders of varying permeability that impede or facilitate its movement. They look closely at a variety of platforms and objects of knowledge, from tangible commodities—like hybrid wheat seeds, penicillin, Robusta coffee, naval weaponry, seed banks, satellites and high-performance computers—to the more conceptual apparatuses of plant phenotype data and statistics. Moreover, this volume decenters the Global North, tracking how knowledge moves along multiple paths across the borders of Mexico, India, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, the Soviet Union, China, Angola, Palestine and the West Bank, as well as the United States and the United Kingdom. An important new work of transnational history, this collection recasts the way we understand and analyze knowledge circulation.Introduction: Writing the Transnational History of Knowledge Flows in a Global Age (by John Krige).
Knowledge, State Power, and the Invention of International Science (by Jessica Wang).
Regulating Transnational Knowledge Flows
Harnessing Invention: The British Admiralty and the Political Economy of Knowledge in the World War I Era (by Katherine C. Epstein).
Culture Diplomacy: Penicillin and the Problem of Anglo-American Knowledge Sharing in World War II (by Michael A. Falcone).
Dangerous Calculations: The Origins of the US High-Performance Computer Export Safeguards Regime, 1968–1974 (by Mario Daniels).
Regulating the Transnational Flow of Intangible Knowledge of Space Launchers between the United States and China in the Clinton Era (by John Krige).
Facilitating Transnational Knowledge Flows
Beyond Borlaug’s Shadow: Mexican Seeds and the Narratives of the Green Revolution (by Gabriela Soto Laveaga).
Moving Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Colonial Angola to the Breakfast Tables of Main Street America, 1940–1961 (by Maria Gago).
Statistics and Emancipation from New Deal America to Guerrilla Warfare in Guinea-Bissau (by Tiago Saraiva).
Security versus Sovereignty in a Palestinian Seed Bank (by Courtney Fullilove).
How Data Cross Borders: Globalizing Plant Knowledge through Transnational Data Management and Its Epistemic Economy (by Sabina Leonelli).
Conclusion: Decentering the Global North (by John Krige).