27 February 2026 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

Victor Seow (Harvard University)

“‘In the Service of Production’: Labor Psychology in Socialist China”

When accidents, defects, and slowdowns occur in sites of production, who—or what—tends to be held responsible: the worker, the machine, or the conditions of work? In 1950s China, psychologists would offer a distinctive answer to this question under the banner labor psychology. Based largely at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Psychology, they entered factories and mines and treated breakdowns less as episodes of human error than as evidence of misalignment that could be redesigned. Their attention turned to work rhythms, signals, instruments, targets, and feedback. This talk follows labor psychology across three areas: accident research that reframed responsibility in terms of objective conditions; training studies that accelerated skilled perception and judgment at the point of production; and investigations of innovation and competition that used prototypes, indicator boards, and timely knowledge of results to organize collective creativity. Together, these projects reveal a Mao-era effort to engineer a socialist “human factor” through feedback-rich arrangements of cues and comparison, promising safety, efficiency, and initiative at once while rendering work newly legible and regulable.

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Victor Seow is an associate professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is the author of Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (2022) and is currently completing work on a book to be entitled The Human Factor: How Chinese Psychologists Reimagined the Science of Work in the Machine Age. 

 

13 February 2026 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

Meg Perret (Texas A&M) 

“Migration Is Natural: Conservation Biologists and the U.S.-Mexico Border Wall”
This paper examines the entangled histories of conservation biology and border militarization in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In particular, I consider how the construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall during the Trump presidency shaped biodiversity conservation in the region. Using archival research and oral history interviews, I analyze the production and circulation of scientific research about the environmental effects of the construction of border barriers through national parks and the consequences for the endangered species that live there. While scholars in environmental studies have examined the co-construction of border militarization and environmental policy and advocacy in the borderlands, they have not closely attended to how U.S. immigration policy has influenced the production of scientific knowledge in conservation biology. Drawing upon frameworks from science and technology studies and environmental humanities, this research investigates how scientific knowledge production shaped and was shaped by political controversies and social movements surrounding the environmental consequences of border militarization. I consider how U.S. immigration policy has reconfigured relationships among conservation biologists, environmentalists, migrant justice advocates, and other borderlands communities.
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Dr. Meg Perret is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Languages and Cultures at TExas A&M University and an affiliate with the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She completed her Ph.D. in History of Science with a secondary emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Harvard University. Her research examines how narratives about nature shape our collective futures.