Dangerous Trade: Call for Posters
We invite poster proposals for an international conference on the historical relationship between industrial hazards and globalization. The conference will be held December 13-15, 2007, at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York. Our poster session, to be held in conjunction with workshops and other sessions, aims to draw in additional participants, from graduate students to senior scholars, interested in presenting related research.
Especially for two later periods of global economic integration, the late nineteenth/early twentieth and the later twentieth century, the conference will highlight several themes:
- the making of hazardous industries in particular places. Issues may range from design, engineering, and management of dangerous processes; to worker health and disease; to housing and sanitation; to air and water pollution; to ecological impacts on surrounding lands and livelihoods. The industries involved may be older, as in agriculture or mining, or newer, as in chemical and nuclear plants.
- knowing and controlling industrial hazards. Issues may include the evolving awareness of danger, risk, or dissemination; changing and conflicting styles of knowledge, whether lay or expert; changing means of detection and diagnosis; the influence of worker or environmental organizations and advocacy; the impact of different state and regulatory approaches; and debates and struggles over solutions, whether technological, legal or political.
- historical relationship between intra-workplace and wider environmental hazards, and between the professional and legal terrains of “occupational” and “environmental” health.
- cross-national passages in the making, recognition and remedy of industrial hazards. These may involve multinational companies, capital, managers, migratory workers, raw materials, experts, technologies, scientific or other cultural practices, national or international agencies, or labor or environmental groups.
- comparative and supra-national approaches to the history of industrial hazard.
Our deliberations will strive for a more synthetic understanding of how the history of industrial hazards has varied across industries, nations, and periods, and of how, when, and why hazardous processes and their associated knowledge and remedy have (or have not) traveled from one nation or territory to another.
Poster proposals must include an abstract of 250 words and a curriculum vitae. The deadline for paper proposals is October 15, 2007; acceptances will be sent out soon thereafter. They should be sent as attachments, in Word or WordPerfect files, to Christopher.Sellers@stonybrook.edu, or else as hard copies, to Christopher Sellers, History Department, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794 USA.
