Seminar:
Making Space for Engineering Education: the South China Institute of Engineering

Dr. Christine Y. L. Luk
Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences
The University of Hong Kong

Date: 16 November 2016 (Wed)
Time: 4:00 pm
Venue: Room 201, 2/F, May Hall, The University of Hong Kong

Abstract
The development of engineering education is a pedagogical priority for both the Nationalist and the Communist Parties, as engineering has dominated both the way in which modern Chinese leadership envisioned the world and the training of many of its most important leaders. This study examines the spatial history of an important engineering school, the South China Institute of Engineering (hua nan gong xue yuan, SCIE) during the Republican-Communist transitional years in twentieth-century China. I suggest that studying the spatial dimension of engineering education reflects the different techniques of power through which space and engineering knowledge are mediated. Drawing on newspapers, architects’ biographies, architectural histories, and university pamphlets, I study the exterior aesthetic style as well as the interior spatial arrangement of SCIE, examining how the efforts to provide space for engineering education reflects a changing geopolitical order in modern China.

About the Speaker
Christine Y. L. Luk is postdoctoral fellow at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. She is the author of A History of Biophysics in Contemporary China (Springer, 2015). Her writings have appeared in East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2016), Journal of the History of Biology (2015), Research Yearbook of Philosophy of Technology in China (2012), and Women in Engineering and Technology Research (2010). The current study on the history of engineering education in modern China will be published in Engineering Studies (December 2016).

All are welcome!
Enquiries: 3917-5772 | ihss@hku.hk