BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:icalendar-ruby CALSCALE:GREGORIAN X-WR-CALNAME:Book Event with Matt Wisnioski: Beyond the Buzzword\, a Criti cal History of “Innovation” X-WR-TIMEZONE:Pacific Time (US & Canada) BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260809T222305Z UID:tag:localist.com\,2008:EventInstance_51834446153386 DTSTART:20260227T003000Z DTEND:20260227T020000Z DESCRIPTION:The consensus that innovation drives American progress has crac ked. For over half a century innovation served as a universal good. While the imperative to innovate for a better future continues to fuel systemic change around the world\, critics now assail innovation culture as an engi ne of inequality or accuse its do-gooders of woke groupthink. What happene d? \n\nPlease RSVP at this link to attend.\n\nIn this book talk\, the hist orian Matt Wisnioski investigates how innovation—a once obscure academic term—became ingrained in our institutions\, our education\, and our bel iefs about ourselves. He reveals the central role of a new class of expert s in spreading toolkits and mindsets from the cornfields of 1940s Iowa to Silicon Valley tech giants today. This group posited that “innovators” were society’s most important change agents and remade the nation in th eir image. The innovation culture they built transcended partisan division s and made strange bedfellows. Wisnioski will discuss how Kennedy-era poli cymakers inspired President Nixon’s dream of a Nobel Prize for innovator s\, how anti-military professors built the first university incubators for entrepreneurs\, how radical feminists became millionaire consultants\, ho w demands for a rust belt manufacturing renaissance inspired theories of a global creative class\, how philanthropic encouraged girls and minority c hildren to pursue innovative lives\, and why the innovation consensus is n ow in dispute.\n\nWisnioski will be joined in conversation by Stanford's E lizabeth Kessler\, an advanced lecturer in the American Studies program wh o frequently offers courses on the history of Silicon Valley.\n\nMatthew W isnioski is an interdisciplinary historian of innovation\, engineering\, s cience education\, and the nexus of science\, engineering\, art\, and desi gn (SEAD). He teaches at Virginia Tech University\, where he serves as pro fessor and director of graduate studies in Science\, Technology\, and Soci ety. He also hols affiliated appointments in History and Engineering Educa tion. He is the author of Every American an Innovator: How Innovation Beca me a Way of Life and Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America\, and co-editor with Eric S. Hintz and Marie Stettler Kl eine of Does America Need More Innovators? He is writing a new book on The Magic School Bus and the history of science education. His public writing has appeared in The Atlantic\, Chronicle of Higher Education\, IEEE Spect rum\, Medium\, Science\, and the Washington Post.\n\nElizabeth Kessler is an Advanced Lecturer in the American Studies program at Stanford. Her rese arch and teaching focus on twentieth and twenty-first century American vis ual culture. Her diverse interests include: the role of aesthetics\, visua l culture\, and media in modern and contemporary science\, especially astr onomy\; the interchange between technology and ways of seeing and represen ting\; the history of photography\; and the representation of fashion in d ifferent media. Her first book\, Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telesc ope Images and the Astronomical Sublime\, on the aesthetics of deep space images\, was published in 2012. She’s currently writing on book on extra terrestrial time capsules\, as well as developing a new project on fashion photography. LOCATION:Green Library SUMMARY:Book Event with Matt Wisnioski: Beyond the Buzzword\, a Critical H istory of “Innovation” URL;VALUE=URI:https://events.stanford.edu/event/wisnioski-innovation-critic al-history CATEGORIES:Lecture/Presentation/Talk END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR