Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World

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NSF funding is requested for a two-day workshop on "Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World," which is to be held in December of 2007 at Stony Brook University. This conference builds on recent scholarly interest in exploring boundaries between the history of science, environmental history and geography, as reflected in a 2002 conference and resulting 2004 volume of OSIRIS entitled "Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Health in Modern Environments." That conference and volume consolidated an emergent set of themes and questions along the boundaries of these fields that moved beyond the debates generated by social constructivism and its critics. The proposed conference will test the potential of this foundation. It will also explore approaches to a world-scale narrative that received less attention in this earlier endeavor, globalization, by singling out one kind of local environment for study, that of modern industry. Our choice exploits another related scholarly trend. The history of industrial hazards, as it has taken on more environmental and ecological dimensions especially in the United States, has also sparked scholarly interest in many nations. The conference also builds on the precedents of two recent international conferences on workplace hazards, in Milan in 1998 and in Exeter, U.K., in 2006, the latter organized by Melling and Sellers. This trend toward international dialogue over the history of industrial hazards, mostly among non-U.S.-based scholars, paralleling as it has the convergences in American-based scholarship represented by the OSIRIS volume, has created a unique scholarly opportunity.Intellectual Merit: The proposed conference will advance both these emergent strands of scholarly dialogue by (1) enabling more focused and comparative discussion among representatives from history of science and medicine, environmental history, geography and other disciplinary neighbors (2) bringing out cross-national and international dimensions, especially relating to globalization (3) highlighting questions about the historical relationship between intra-workplace and wider environmental hazards (4) internationalizing both strands of dialogue, by balancing between non-American scholars (predominant in the recent conferences on history of industrial hazards) and American-based scholars (predominant in the OSIRIS collection). NSF-funding will enable us to invite 25 scholars, balanced between those who are American and foreign-based(from the U.K. and Europe, as well India, Australia, and South Africa). Tightening the focus to particular technologies, toxic exposures, and time periods that are of current interest to multiple scholars, we will facilitate comparative discussion and analysis. We are also encouraging papers on relevant international networks and institutions, and on the ways hazardous technologies and associated knowledge, whether of risks or remedies, have (or have not) traveled from one nation or territory to another.Broader Impacts: The resulting discussions and edited volume will offer a model for how more culturalist and materialist styles of scholarship may blend and effectively speak to one another, and for how historians of science and their disciplinary neighbors may address the newer worldscale narrative of globalization. In so doing, we will cultivate an international scholarly network, spur genuinely cross-national veins of inquiry, and advance the prospects for an understanding of the historical relationship between industrial hazards, knowledge, and globalization that is international in composition and scope. A secondary goal is to provide to important historical context and insight for contemporary practitioners and policy-makers.