[URBANTH-L]CFP: Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard Across a Globalizing World

[Angela Jancius]

Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard Across a Globalizing World

We invite paper 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, 
N.Y. It will focus especially on two more recent periods of global economic 
integration, the late nineteenth/early twentieth and the later twentieth 
centuries. 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 textiles, or newer, as 
in petrochemical or nuclear plants. For each period, we seek cases studies 
in both developed and developing worlds.
-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; different state and regulatory approaches and their impacts; and 
debates and struggles over solutions, whether technological, legal or 
political.
--historical relationships between intra-workplace and wider environmental 
hazards, and between the professional and legal terrains of "occupational," 
"environmental," and "public" 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, government 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. The conference will have a workshop format, as we plan 
to move quickly to an edited publication. Accepted participants will be 
expected to submit a full manuscript version of their paper a month and a 
half beforehand, as a basis for conference discussions. Funds will likely be 
available for accepted presenters to cover food, lodging, and travel, 
national as well as international. We hope to strike an even balance between 
U.S. and non-U.S. participants.
Paper proposals must include an abstract of at least five hundred words and 
a curriculum vitae. The deadline for paper proposals is March 31, 2007. They 
should be sent as email attachments, in Word or Wordperfect files, to 
csellers at notes.cc.sunysb.edu or else as hard copies, to Christopher Sellers, 
History Department, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794 USA. 
Please address inquiries to Christopher Sellers, at the above email, or to 
Joseph Melling at J.L.melling at exeter.ac.uk.

Christopher Sellers
History Department
Stony Brook University
N301A SBS Building
Stony Brook, New York 11794-4348
Email: csellers at notes.cc.sunysb.edu