ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Hazards, Accidents, and Knowledge Production in Modern Industry

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Contingency, errors, and troubleshooting are well-established themes in the history of scientific research and technological innovation. This panel examines production problems and health hazards as a site of contestation in modern industry. Foregrounding shop-floor workers, occupational safety officials, and quality-control inspectors, the panel shows how such figures created new knowledge and technical procedures by drawing attention to, studying, and addressing issues that impeded their work and endangered their lives. The panel draws on cases from three countries (China, Soviet Georgia, and Japan) with different political economic systems that, through different mechanisms, pressured enterprises constantly to increase efficiency and output. Facing these pressures, workers and technical officials presented safety and quality concerns not just as a matter of well-being but also as a matter of the efficient and sustainable use of fuels and materials. Rui Zhang’s paper explores how workers in Mao-era China drew on their embodied and emotional experiences to pressure the government into new research and regulation of silicosis. Tamar Qeburia’s paper reveals how Georgian scientists developed the Closed-Top Electric Furnace in response to problems with energy availability, pollution, and worker safety. Niall Chithelen’s paper how cement bag recycling and reuse led to accidents and hampered engineers’ ability to understand concrete structures in Mao-era China. Victor Seow’s paper examines the shifting experiences and medical understandings of “forklift disease” in Japan from the 1960s through the 1980s, situating changes in occupational illness within the emerging regimes of logistical capitalism and industrial rationalization. By drawing on these four cases, the panel explores the relationship between activism, knowledge production, and technological change across the industrial world.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Harvard University

Individual Presentations

• The Management of Silicosis during the Mao Era: Changing Standards, Treatment Experiments, and Workers' Anxieties - Rui Zhang, Douglas College

• Smelting Solutions: Georgian Engineers Against Industrial Decline - Tamar Qeburia, Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies

• Wasteful, Deceptive Recycling: Cement Bags as Forensic Devices in Mao-era China - Niall Chithelen, University of California, San Diego

• “Forklift Disease”: The Making of an Occupational Illness in Postwar Japan - Victor Seow, Harvard University

Session Organizer

• Niall Chithelen, University of California, San Diego