Ongoing Research Projects

Yi-Tang Lin

This project aims to decentralize historical accounts of Cold War science and technology exchange by focusing on Asia and Africa, two regions far too often considered recipients instead of actors in these exchanges. The pathways of rice-related knowledge and technologies established by international development research and programs between these two regions are cases in point. There has been very little historical research on the Green Revolution focusing on rice and even less on the exchange pathways between Pacific Asia and West Africa, probably due to the linguistic barriers set by both regions. Yet, learning from Asia has been an unceasing endeavor for rice research and programs implemented in West Africa. As early as the 1960s, experts and officers in Pacific Asian countries were mobilized, either by their countries’ official development or by international agricultural research centers, to take part in missions to increase rice yields and to alleviate hunger in West Africa. They encountered different varieties of rice and practices on the ground. Knitting together knowledge and practices transferred by official development agencies and international rice research centers to Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire, the proposed research asks why some knowledge and practices became international while some remained local. This team project challenges the dominant narrative that Cold War-era international agricultural assistance focused on high-yielding seed. This narrative overlooks other strands of agricultural knowledge and practice that also transcended national borders in the name of feeding the population during and after the Green Revolution. This project focuses on three major pathways: 1) international agricultural research centers funded by a complex of international donors; 2) official development assistance from Japan, China, and Taiwan; and 3) local agricultural scientists and workers in Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire.

This research will open a new window on Asian-African solidarity during Cold War by going beyond diplomacy and concentrating on the rice knowledge generated and held on the ground. It will also contribute to the history of colonialism by linking the post-colonial period in the aftermaths of the British, French, and Japanese empires, and US postwar imperialism as expressed through rice-planting in West Africa. In addition to its academic impact, this research will also be relevant to organizations such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Gates Foundation, as it presents local historical data on their ongoing programs and partners. With the database and online data visualization, supported by S3IT, this research will shed light on the historical making of international rice research and provide information on related transregional communication. This research will also inform policy-makers about the growing proportion of non-Western foreign aid donors by discussing their similarities and differences compared to the national development agencies of North Atlantic countries.

The Project Website: https://www.rice-asia-africa.com/

The Swiss National Science Foundation Data Portal: https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/208475

William Lyon

As part of the SNSF project, my current research focuses on the last quarter of the 20th century, with a concentration on consumer culture in Ghana. I am centering the question, how did Ghana become a rice eating nation? Unlike many other countries in the region, Ghanaians’ daily diets did not traditionally include much rice. However, since the mid-1980s especially in the urban centers, there has been a radical shift in eating patterns which has made rice central to many peoples’ daily meals. The research posits that increases in rice consumption in Ghana are the result of economic and political crises in the late 1970s and 1980s leading to food scarcity and a increase in food aid and later food imports, with rice taking a prominent role. Eating patterns influenced by food aid, became solidified by longer term cultural and culinary shifts. These were driven by children, busy mothers, and a growing urban middle class lacking time to cook traditional foods and looking for quick and relatively affordable alternatives. As a result, by the end of the 20th century the shift to eating rice daily in Ghana’s urban areas was increasingly common.

Scott Ma

My PhD project studies the history of the science of agricultural development in modern Japan, particularly its intertwining with colonialism and foreign aid, contextualizing its ideas and institutions within the ambit of premodern Confucian thought about the proper techniques of human development and imperial rule. Entitled A Confucian Science, my dissertation project shows how a native Japanese strain of early modern restorationist Confucianism motivated agricultural colonization projects from Meiji Hokkaido to wartime Manchuria, and from wartime Manchuria to contemporary education and agricultural development aid to Africa. In doing so, he tracks the residue of the “premodern” in the “modern,” reestablishes Japan within its East Asian context, and identifies a hybridized but indisputably local agricultural tradition that continues to inform politics and scientific policy even today.

Yi-Tang Lin

The Rockefeller Fellows Dataset (https://rockfellows.hypotheses.org/discover-the-database) originates from the Swiss National Science Foundation Project “Rockefeller Fellows as Heralds of Globalization: The Circulation of Elites, Knowledge, and Practices of Modernization (1920s-1970s)” (2018-2022). Mobilizing this database, I am tracing the career trajectories of Chinese scientists across the political changes of the 20th century. Based on my published article (2022, see below) on biologists, there is a strong continuity despite the regime changes. I am currently exploring scientists from other disciplines.

*Yi-Tang, Lin. “Navigating between Political Authorities: Chinese Rockefeller Fellows in Biology and Chemistry and Their Career Trajectories from 1949 to 1966.” In Knowledge, Power, and Networks: Elites in Transition in Modern China, edited by Cécile Armand, Christian Henriot, and Huei-min Sun, 289–321. Brill, 2022.

For other research notes on this database:  https://rockfellows.hypotheses.org/category/from-data_research_news