CEAS Global Asia Speaker Series

"After Extraction: Human-Centered Lessons for a Carbon Present"

by Dr. Victor Seow, Associate Professor of the History of Science (Harvard University)

October 2, 2025  |  6 PM (CT)

HYBRID: Watson Library, W3W & Zoom

REGISTER FOR ZOOM WEBINAR

What can a single mine teach us about the making—and unmaking—of industrial modernity? Centered on Asia’s onetime largest colliery, this talk takes this one site as both a microscope and a mirror to examine how machines, workers, and states built carbon futures, and what that history offers for thinking transitions in a warming world. At the mine, mechanization promised control—over output, risk, and labor—yet growth often meant more bodies, more hazards, and more entanglement with energy‑hungry infrastructure. Across Imperial, Nationalist, and Communist regimes, the mine also reveals a striking continuity, with states of different stripes investing coal with developmentalist meaning and mobilizing people to sustain its prodigious production. Rather than treating human beings as interchangeable “calories,” the talk stays with workers’ experiences to ask how energy’s infrastructures reordered life and authority, and why transitions tend to layer new forms atop old ones. Looking at the world in the mine illuminates the political and moral stakes of our carbon present without pretending that the past supplies ready‑made fixes—only a sharper language for what comes after extraction.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Victor Seow is a historian of technology, science, and industry, focusing on China and Japan in global contexts and on histories of energy and work. He is the author of Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2022), a study of how energy relates to power through the history of Asia’s onetime largest coal mine. Carbon Technocracy was awarded several prizes from different fields, including the Association for Asian Studies' John Whitney Hall Book Prize, the Chinese Historians in the United States’ Academic Excellence Award, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations' Michael H. Hunt Prize for International History. At present, Victor is completing a history of industrial psychology in China, tentatively titled, “The Human Factor: How Chinese Psychologists Reimagined a Science of Work in the Machine Age.” In 2025, he received the Sarton Prize for the History of Science from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Victor currently teaches in the history of science department at Harvard University, where he is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences.

Co-sponsored by the KU Center for East Asian Studies, Department of Geography & Atmospheric Science, and Department of History