Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard Across A Globalizing World
December 13–15, 2007, Stony Brook University
Though we Americans largely assume them under control, industrial hazards have quietly turned into one of the world’s foremost killers. The global burden of deaths from work-related disease and injury alone in 1999, was 1.1 million, roughly the same toll as from malaria, and not counting the millions more who perished from pollution and other industrial exposures outside the workplace. Most experts project these numbers will rise over the first half of the 21st century (WHO 1999), based on a continuing up-surge in the transnational movements of capital, companies, commodities, and people between nations that we have come to know as globalization. These trends, and episodes such as the recent discovery of lead-contaminated toys, have raised new concerns about the limits to national projects of environmental and occupational hazard control. The time is ripe for exploration and analysis of just how industrial hazards and their remedies have varied and traveled from nation to nation, place to place, across our globalizing world. By understanding these processes better, we also move toward viable solutions, including ones in which both scholars and citizens can help.
An international conference on the historical relationship between industrial hazards and globalization will be held December 13–15, 2007, at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY. The conference will draw together scholars from many corners of the US as well as the UK, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Among the nearly thirty scholars in attendance, historians, joined by geographers, sociologists and anthropologists, and contemporary health practitioners, will present on-going work on the following themes:
On Thursday afternoon of the 13th, the conference will begin with two sessions on contemporary sessions on hazardous industries in the developing world. These sessions are open without registration to the public. We invite a wide range of participants, from students and faculty across Stony Brook and other university departments to civic leaders on Long Island and elsewhere.
Please note that registration is required for succeeding sessions. These will revolve around discussions of pre-circulated papers, which registering will enable you to read. These papers will focus on accidents to dust to air pollution to nuclear plants. Registered participants will gain access to the papers and are invited to participate in the discussions, as scholars evenly balanced between US and non-US participants, comment on each others’ on-going research.
Download Conference Flyer. Please print and post or distribute.