The Uneven Development of Industrial Hazards: Lead and Oil in the U.S. versus Mexico, 1930-1990

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。该项目是对美国和墨西哥从大萧条到北美自由贸易协定（1994年）之前的特定工业危害的历史研究。该项目是NSF资助的会议的直接产物，这些会议探索了工业危害的历史作为跨学科的“接触区”，科学和技术的历史越来越多地与环境和健康历史，地理，其他社会科学以及全球化的劳动和经济历史相遇。研究的问题是，发达国家和发展中国家在20世纪中后期工业危害历史的轨迹如何比较？该项目通过比较美国和墨西哥的铅冶炼厂和炼油厂的危险历史来回答这个问题，调查开始于这些工业过程如何通过“全球组装”实现，即便携式公司、技术和专业知识如何适应特定地区。研究特别集中在这些行业的主要危害的专家和非专业框架：冶炼厂周围的铅和二氧化硫，炼油厂周围的苯以及硫化氢和二氧化硫。对比的认识，调查，解释和预防危害的方法进行了检查，因为这些合并之间的各种专家以及相关的非专家在这两个国家。该项目还跟踪每种可识别的工业危害方法随时间变化的方式。这些方法的差异进行了分析，他们可能反映了政治经济，监管策略，在资金和支持特定类型的调查和监督的差异;以及在各自的地方和国家的权力平衡。更详细的环境，档案和口述历史的研究和比较的一些地方的工业遗址：铅冶炼厂在埃尔帕索，得克萨斯州和奇瓦瓦州市，奇瓦瓦州;和炼油厂在比蒙特/港亚瑟，得克萨斯州和波萨里卡，韦拉克鲁斯州。智力优势：该项目（1）测试将工业过程和毒素作为科学对象的传记方法的潜力和局限性，以将社会文化和建构主义的见解与政治经济学和环境历史的唯物主义方法相结合;（2）澄清这两个国家的工业危害是如何不均衡地演变的，以及为什么;（3）将这两个国家的转变与更加预防性的工业危害科学、法律和政治进行比较，集中精力发展了解、监测和控制特别是铅和苯的低水平暴露的制度;（4）比较这些工作场所内的危害与当地社区、环境和消费者所受危害的关系。更广泛的影响：由此产生的书提供了第一次在发达国家和发展中国家的工业危害的历史之间的深入比较。它为许多进一步研究这一尚未得到充分研究但越来越重要的对比提供了先例。在方法论上，这本书提供了一个新的模式，更多的文化主义和唯物主义风格的学术如何融合，并有效地相互交谈，以及科学史学家和他们的学科邻居如何解决全球化的新世界规模的叙事。第二个影响是为当代实践者和政策制定者提供了重要的历史背景和见解。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (public Law 111-5). The project is an historical study of select industrial hazards in the United States and Mexico, from the Great Depression to just prior to the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994). The project is a direct outgrowth of NSF-funded conferences that have explored the history of industrial hazards as an interdisciplinary "contact zone," where the history of science and technology has increasingly met up with environmental and health history, geography, other social sciences, and the labor and economic history of globalization. The research question is how did the mid-to-late twentieth-century trajectory of industrial hazard history in developed nations compare to that in developing ones? The project uses a comparative hazard history of lead smelters and oil refineries in the United States versus Mexico to answer this question.The investigation begins with how these industrial processes materialized through "global assemblages," as portable corporations, technology, and expertise forged adaptations to particular locales. Research concentrates especially on expert and lay framings of key hazards in these industries: lead and sulfur dioxide around smelters, and benzene as well as hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide around refineries. Contrasting approaches to the perception, investigation, interpretation and prevention of hazard are examined, as these coalesced among a variety of experts as well as relevant non-experts in both nations. The project also tracks the ways each identifiable approach to industrial hazards changed over time. These differences in approach are analyzed for how they may have reflected differences in political economy, regulatory strategies, in funding and support for particular types of investigation and oversight; as well as in the respective local and national balances of power. More detailed environmental, archival and oral historical study and comparison of a few local industrial sites is conducted: the lead smelters at El Paso, Texas and Chihuahua City, Chihuahua; and the oil refineries at Beamont/Port Arthur, Texas and Poza Rica, Veracruz. Intellectual Merit: The project (1) tests the potential and limits of a biographical approach to industrial processes and toxins, as scientific objects, for integrating socio-cultural and constructivist insights with materialist methods of political economy and environmental history; (2) clarifies just how unevenly industrial hazards in these two nations evolved, and why; (3) compares the turns in these two nations to a more precautionary science, law and politics of industrial hazards, by concentrating on evolving regimes for understanding, monitoring and controlling low-level exposures to lead and benzene in particular; (4) compares the ways hazards inside these workplaces came to be related to those imposed on local communities, environments, and consumers. Broader Impacts: The resulting book offers the first in-depth comparison between the history of industrial hazards in a developed and a developing nation. It provides a precedent for many further studies of this as yet under-examined but ever more important contrast. Methodologically, the book provides a new 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 world-scale narrative of globalization. A secondary impact is providing important historical context and insight for contemporary practitioners and policy-makers.