Skip to main content
Lever PressLever Press
  • About
  • Books
  • Series
  • Publish With Us
  • Join Us
  • Impact
  • News
  • Events

Share the story of what Open Access means to you

a graphic of a lock that is open, the universal logo for open access

University of Michigan needs your feedback to better understand how readers are using openly available ebooks. You can help by taking a short, privacy-friendly survey.

  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. New Materials: Towards a History of Consistency
The complete manuscript of this work was subjected to a partly closed ("single blind") review process. For more information, please see our Peer Review Commitments and Guidelines.

New Materials: Towards a History of Consistency

Amy E. Slaton 2020 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license © Amy E. Slaton
Open Access Open Access
This edited volume gathers eight cases of industrial materials development, broadly conceived, from North America, Europe and Asia over the last 200 years. Whether given utility as building parts, fabrics, pharmaceuticals, or foodstuffs, whether seen by their proponents as human-made or “found in nature,” materials result from the designation of some matter as both knowable and worth knowing about. In following these determinations we learn that the production of physical novelty under industrial, imperial and other cultural conditions has historically accomplished a huge range of social effects, from accruals of status and wealth to demarcations of bodies and geographies. Among other cases, New Materials traces the beneficent self-identity of Quaker asylum planners who devised soundless metal cell locks in the early 19th century, and the inculcation of national pride attending Taiwanese carbon-fiber bicycle parts in the 21st; the racialized labor organizations promoted by California orange breeders in the 1910s, and bureaucratized distributions of blame for deadly high-rise fires a century later. Across eras and global regions New Materials reflects circumstances not made clear when technological innovation is explained solely as a by-product of modernizing impulses or critiqued simply as a craving for profit. Whether establishing the efficacy of nano-scale pharmaceuticals or the tastiness of farmed catfish, proponents of new materials enact complex political ideologies. In highlighting their actors’ conceptions of efficiency, certainty, safety, pleasure, pain, faith and identity, the authors reveal that to produce a “new material” is invariably to preserve other things, to sustain existing values and social structures.
Read Book
  • EPUB (2.43 MB)
  • PDF (5.76 MB)
Buy Book
ISBN(s)
  • 978-1-64315-013-0 (paper)
  • 978-1-64315-014-7 (open access)
Subject
  • History
Citable Link
  • Table of Contents

  • Stats

  • Cover
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Contents
  • Chapter One: Introduction
  • PART I: MATERIALS TESTED, SUCCESS DEFINED
    • Chapter Two: Muddy to Clean
    • Chapter Three: Room at the Bottom
  • PART II: MATERIALS PRODUCED, LABOR DIRECTED
    • Chapter Four: The Scientific Co-Op
    • Chapter Five: Plyscrapers, Gluescrapers, and Mother Nature’s Fingerprints
  • PART III: MATERIALS INTERPRETED, COMMUNITIES DESIGNED
    • Chapter Six: The Inmate’s Window
    • Chapter Seven: Cultural Frames
    • Chapter Eight: Grenfell Cloth
  • Afterword: Old Materials
  • List of Contributors
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index
752 views since April 20, 2020
Lever PressAmherst, MAinfo@leverpress.org

FacebookTwitter

Our Partners
  • Amherst College Press
  • Oberlin Group
  • Michigan Publishing
Peer Review
  • Our Commitments and Guidelines
© 2020 Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International license · Accessibility · Preservation
Powered by Fulcrum logo · Log In
x This site requires cookies to function correctly.