Monthly sessions are back! After this year´s joint ICOHTEC-SHOT annual meeting, Stefan Poser, from the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, will be hosting this month’s presentation on his paper: “Material of Dreams and Nightmares: cultural history of technology of plastics”
Plastics generated quite different feelings and opinions from their first onset. On the one hand, they were often recognized as cheap mass products, partially replacing valuable or rare materials (“Ersatzstoffe”). On the other hand, they took over a fundamental role as promoters of technical developments and became key-materials of the emerging consumer societies in the post war period. Thus, they were prized e.g. by announcing the century of plastics in the 1950s. Whereas associating plastics with “progress” might have been the dominating point of view until the early 1970s, this changed after the European oil crisis. Environmental concerns gained more influence in Western European societies. “Jute instead of plastics” became a well-known slogan of the environmental movement in Germany. What are the reasons for this shift of the public opinion? Why did plastics gain an important role in the environmental discussion, although heating of oil has a higher ecological impact and means – compared to the production of plastics – wasting a raw material? Why did the reputation of plastics changed again in the 1990s? There is still a lack of research concerning these developments. The paper will analyze the discourse on plastics mainly based on sources from Germany. In doing so, it aims to contribute to the investigation of public acceptance of technology and technology-based materials.
This meeting will be hosted in English both in person and via Zoom.
Registrations: carlos.sanhueza@uchile.cl
Stefan Poser, PD Dr. phil., is a private lecturer at the Institute of History of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology KIT, deputy head of the Working Group on the History of Technology at the VDI Berlin-Brandenburg and president of the UNESCO-based International Committee for the History of Technology, ICOHTEC. His work focuses on the social management of technical risks and the playful use of technology.
https://www.geschichte.kit.edu/english/21_2150.php
Photograph: Paulo Oliveira/Alamy
labhcts.org 