Developing countries such as India, have a complex historical as well as contemporary relation with hidden hunger and micronutrient deficiencies. As a result, food fortification programmes emerge as a popular techno-scientific strategy to improve the country's nutritional topography and public health. International agencies such as World Bank often partner with the governments of such countries of the Global South to deliver national fortification programmes. Pharmaceutical and food companies also increasingly view fortified foods as a commercial opportunity. These companies are also often the conveyors of health messages through advertisements and media campaigns. In many cases, those media campaigns are supported by the state, thus, blurring the lines between commercial advertisement and public health awareness. Interestingly, these inter-sectoral alliances are often formed around the promotion of specific fortified products. In India, rice and Horlicks are two especially high-profile fortified products whereby the production, distribution, marketing, and consumption of these foods remain tangled in multiple inter-sectoral relations. It is the story of these social and political aspects of the science of food fortification in the context of urban post-colonial India that my paper shall attempt to examine. To that end, I will primarily undertake a discourse and a content analysis of the contemporary advertisements, brand campaigns, marketing strategies and policy documents used by corporate players, international organisations and the Indian state to promote fortified rice and Horlicks between 2020 and 2025 in India. In doing so, my paper focuses on the emerging interactions between food, eating and techno-sciences in the Global South.

The colonial historiography of science often presents unidirectional narratives, portraying 'Western scientific' knowledge as entirely displacing indigenous ways of knowing. This paper challenges such linear interpretations by examining the case of indigo dye in India. Narratives surrounding indigo have traditionally been dominated by discussions of colonial plantation systems, the rise of synthetic indigo, and the decline of Indian indigo. However, the continuity of indigo traditions in various parts of India challenges the dominant narrative that portrays the Global South as passive receivers and consumers of colonial modernity.

Using case studies of indigo cultivation and dyeing in South India (Madras Province), this paper illustrates how their survival offers new perspectives for conceptualizing indigenous resilience within the colonial discourse of science. Contrary to portraying indigenous knowledge as passive, I argue that indigo practices are dynamic socio-technological ensembles that emerged through the specific historical contexts of the Global South. In doing so, I explore how peasants and textile dyers actively participated in, preserved, adapted, and reimagined their knowledge of indigo. Synthesizing historical, conceptual, and archival sources, this paper demonstrates how indigenous indigo practices resisted and actively shaped the development of scientific and colonial economic knowledge. It concludes by articulating the need for a situated, nuanced epistemological narrative that foregrounds indigenous agency and resistance from the Global South.

Historians of Technology have agency as scientific and Intelligentsia actors in documenting and scrutinizing technological inequalities foundational of new world orders. This study explores the recent history, in the Global South (GS), of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) divide, and nature/status of participation of the GS in the world AI governance agenda. It also highlights, inspired on Henri Bergson’s theory of time and imagination, the unprecedented phenomenological and historiographical temporality of the technology of AI as a unique epistemic and methodological challenge to historians. International endeavours in AI governance have been highly excludent of entire parts of the world, primarily of the GS. Additionally, there is a deep digital divide (socio-technical capacity and access) between North and most of the GS. Despite AI is a transboundary technology, and AI governance deficit is globally endemic, 118 countries of the GS have been left out of transnational AI governance standards and discussion groups. Two countries in the world account for half of the world’s hyperscale data centres, and, as a colonial extractive practice, leading AI global companies mine data from the GS, with their countries often complicit. Exploratory AI in the GS has or may lead to the fostering of unparalleled threats of foreign information manipulation and political interference, exclusion, bias, oppression, flawed role in the global economy, financial instability, commodification of citizens, epistemic enfeeblement, dis-subjetivation (Giorgio Agamben’s concept), and impairment of human agency, autonomy and flourishing. History of Technology in the GS witnesses and may have a novel voice about this neo-panopticon.

This paper examines the intertwined journeys of Ruth Gall, known as Madame Cosmic Rays, and the development of space sciences in Mexico. Gall was instrumental in establishing Mexican space science by founding the Department of Outer Space (DEE) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her academic identity was shaped by her experiences across the global North and South: a Polish-born Jewish physicist nationalized as a Mexican, she trained in chemistry and physics in France, Mexico, and the USA, and was known at different times as Rojza Sonabend, Ruth Sonabend, and Ruth Gruen. Her transnational displacements and evolving identity parallel the intergalactic trajectories of cosmic rays, her primary focus of scientific study.
To understand Gall’s role as a transforming and transformative advocate of space for Mexico and the broader Third World, I analyze her unorganized archive at UNAM’s Biblioteca Conjunta de Ciencias de la Tierra. My exploration will cover three phases: the precursor period of the 1930s, marked by Gall’s transnational mobilization; the establishment phase of DEE, focusing on Gall’s recruitment and training strategies; and the consolidation phase of the 1970s, during which Gall’s department expanded its personnel and research topics. During this time, Gall engaged in a scientific practice informed by values such as Third World solidarity and developmentalism; science as a platform for feminism and social justice; and emerging planetary environmentalism. Ultimately, this work calls to examine how the transnational circulation of scientists, instruments, and theories is influenced by experiences related to gender, nationhood, and sociopolitical engagement.