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This talk is based on research for Professor Seow's current book project, "The Human Factor: How Chinese Psychologists Reimagined the Science of Work in the Machine Age," which examines how labor itself was made into an object of scientific inquiry.

Focusing on the history of industrial psychology in China from the 1930s to the present, it shows how psychologists repeatedly reimagined and reconfigured their field in response to shifting political and industrial demands. That process generated a durable tension between devising methods to meet managerial demands for productivity and improving workers' safety and well-being.

By tracing how this tension was negotiated across decades of upheaval, this book highlights how labor became a key site where the ambitions and contradictions of industrial society were visibly exposed.
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Victor Seow is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He is a historian of technology and science, specializing in modern China and Japan in their global contexts. His research seeks to advance a more integrated understanding of industrial society by examining how technological artifacts, scientific knowledge, and forces of production intersect in shaping economic development, labor organization, and environmental change, with particular emphasis on energy and work as engines of production and levers of governance.

He is the author of "Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), a book that uses the history of East Asia's onetime largest coal mine to explore questions about the relationship between energy and power in the industrial modern age. It demonstrates how Japanese imperial, Chinese Nationalist, and Chinese Communist regimes alike turned to coal as the foundation of industrial growth and state power. This faith in carbon thrived on paradox-anxieties about scarcity alongside fantasies of inexhaustibility-and exacted staggering human and environmental costs. The book further reveals that even in the most mechanized settings, extraction was sustained by workers' labor, which remained indispensable to the technoscientific regime that sought to transcend it.