Second Plenary Conference of the Tensions of Europe Network: Lappeenranta, Finland, 24-28 May 2006
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPThe package unexpectedly arrived on a sunny day in July. Judging from its size and shape, I wondered whether it was a CD I had ordered and forgotten about. Then I saw "South Karelian Institute" on the address label, and with a big smile on my face I opened the package. In it was a CD-ROM with a short film that brought back pleasant memories of Lappeenranta. This tranquil, provincial town on beautiful Lake Saimaa in Finland served as the venue of the Second Plenary Conference of the Tensions of Europe Network, which I attended back in May. This unusual gesture of distributing a souvenir CD reflects the enthusiasm with which local organizer Karl-Erik Michelsen and his team from the South Karelian Institute of the Lappeenranta University of Technology, assisted by Donna Mehos of the Foundation for the History of Technology, put together this event on "Technology and the Rethinking of European Borders."
The Lappeenranta conference was linked to important developments in the history of technology in Europe, developments that promise to internationalize the conduct and the content of European techno-historical research. Tensions of Europe was first conceived in 1999, and in 2001–2003 it materialized under the sponsorship of the European Science Foundation (ESF) as a scientific network focused on "Technology and the Making of Europe in the 20th Century." 1 A number of national research councils, [End Page 799] including the National Science Foundation, co-funded this network. From the start, the Foundation for the History of Technology based at the Technical University of Eindhoven has been a major driving force. Since its inception, the network has made a noble effort to bring about more cooperation in research among partners from all corners of the Continent and beyond, especially North America. It thus is an expression of certain changes in the way research in Europe is organized, particularly the move away from exclusively national settings and toward international collaboration. At the same time, it testifies to an increasing thematic interest in the ways in which technology has crossed borders on the European Continent. To organize this effort, the original network was subdivided into nine research-theme groups that have worked hard to identify questions that could be researched fruitfully in collaborative projects. The first phase of this effort culminated in March 2004 in the First Plenary Conference of the Tensions of Europe Network in Budapest, Hungary, where Eva Vámos was the host.
It is against this background of expanding and deepening network connections that the conference in Lappeenranta was organized. At the conference, the Tensions of Europe Network launched its second phase, moving beyond network-building and toward actual research cooperation. A major development in this respect is a new ESF European Collaborative Research (EUROCORES) program called "Inventing Europe: Technology and the Making of Europe, 1850 to the Present." This program aims to form "robust transnational research teams that develop novel perspectives on the mutual shaping of transnational technology developments and the process of European integration." Projects must involve investigators from at least three European countries who will work together on one of the four research topics in the program: "Building Europe through Infrastructures," "Constructing European Ways of Knowing," "Consuming Europe," and "Europe in the Global World." The Tensions of Europe Network and the Inventing Europe program are not formally linked, but key actors from the Tensions of Europe Network initially proposed the program to the ESF, and many scholars from the network are involved in the development of new research proposals for Inventing Europe. Hence, close links between the Tensions of Europe Network and Inventing Europe are likely to endure.
The network's recent focus on collaborative projects had its repercussions for the way the organizers put together the conference program. Apart from the familiar plenary and research sessions, the program also included "round tables" and...
