The John C. Donovan Lecture presents Jennifer Hochschild — "Political Responses to New Technologies: Surveillance? Security? or Meh…"

The John C. Donovan Lecture presents Jennifer Hochschild— "Political Responses to New Technologies: Surveillance? Security? or... Meh?"

“The pen is a virgin,” wrote Filippo de Strata in the late fifteenth century, but “the printing press is a whore.” Two centuries later, bishops appealed to Pope Clement VIII to issue a declaration that coffee consumption violated religious law. The Pope refused. But fifteen years after that, King Charles II of England issued his own Proclamation for the Suppression of Coffee Houses, on the grounds of danger to national security. That, too, failed, rescinded due to popular protest.

We can mock those ancestors for their anxieties about moveable type and coffee shops, but conflict over the risks, benefits, and morality of new technology persists. This talk will address how and why a society accepts or rejects a technology that some welcome as a solution to a problem and others fear as the creation of an even worse problem. Using as a case study forensic DNA phenotyping—an innovation that generated protests and parliamentary debates in Germany but remained largely unnoticed in the United States, Great Britain, and other states— an analysis of varied responses to technology opens broad questions about when essentially random events can change laws and practices in one place but not another. 

Jennifer Hochschild is professor of African and African American studies, professor of public policy, and the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government at Harvard University. She was chair of Harvard’s government department from 2016 to 2019, and president of the American Political Science Association in 2015–2016. She has been the Karl W. Deutsch Guest Professor at Berlin Social Science Center in 2023, a fellow of The Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law & Justice, New York University, and the John W. Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance, Library of Congress. She was William Steward Tod Professor of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University from 1998 to 2000.

Hochschild’s recent books include Race/Class Conflict and Urban Financial Threat (Russell Sage Foundation, 2025) and Genomic Politics: How the Revolution in Genomic Science Is Shaping American Society (Oxford University Press, 2021). Her current research addresses COVID conspiracies and misperceptions, trust in science and norms for scientific authority, and politics of genomic science in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany. 

Sponsored by the John C. Donovan Lecture Fund.

For more information, contact Jenn Berube Lord at jberube@bowdoin.edu or 207-725-3928. 

Open to the public free of charge.

A livestream of this talk will be available on Bowdoin's live events website: www.bowdoin.edu/live

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Co-hosted with: Africana Studies, Government and Legal Studies, Hastings AI Initiative

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