Aluminum Dreams

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Aluminum Dreams

Author : Mimi Sheller
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 380 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2014-02-14
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9780262026826

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Aluminum Dreams by Mimi Sheller Pdf

How aluminum enabled a high-speed, gravity-defying American modernity even as other parts of the world paid the price in environmental damage and political turmoil. Aluminum shaped the twentieth century. It enabled high-speed travel and gravity-defying flight. It was the material of a streamlined aesthetic that came to represent modernity. And it became an essential ingredient in industrial and domestic products that ranged from airplanes and cars to designer chairs and artificial Christmas trees. It entered modern homes as packaging, foil, pots and pans and even infiltrated our bodies through food, medicine, and cosmetics. In Aluminum Dreams, Mimi Sheller describes how the materiality and meaning of aluminum transformed modern life and continues to shape the world today. Aluminum, Sheller tells us, changed mobility and mobilized modern life. It enabled air power, the space age and moon landings. Yet, as Sheller makes clear, aluminum was important not only in twentieth-century technology, innovation, architecture, and design but also in underpinning global military power, uneven development, and crucial environmental and health concerns. Sheller describes aluminum's shiny utopia but also its dark side. The unintended consequences of aluminum's widespread use include struggles for sovereignty and resource control in Africa, India, and the Caribbean; the unleashing of multinational corporations; and the pollution of the earth through mining and smelting (and the battle to save it). Using a single material as an entry point to understanding a global history of modernization and its implications for the future, Aluminum Dreams forces us to ask: How do we assemble the material culture of modernity and what are its environmental consequences? Aluminum Dreams includes a generous selection of striking images of iconic aluminum designs, many in color, drawn from advertisements by Alcoa, Bohn, Kaiser, and other major corporations, pamphlets, films, and exhibitions.

Aluminum Dreams

Author : Mimi Sheller
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 380 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2014-02-14
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9780262321372

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Aluminum Dreams by Mimi Sheller Pdf

How aluminum enabled a high-speed, gravity-defying American modernity even as other parts of the world paid the price in environmental damage and political turmoil. Aluminum shaped the twentieth century. It enabled high-speed travel and gravity-defying flight. It was the material of a streamlined aesthetic that came to represent modernity. And it became an essential ingredient in industrial and domestic products that ranged from airplanes and cars to designer chairs and artificial Christmas trees. It entered modern homes as packaging, foil, pots and pans and even infiltrated our bodies through food, medicine, and cosmetics. In Aluminum Dreams, Mimi Sheller describes how the materiality and meaning of aluminum transformed modern life and continues to shape the world today. Aluminum, Sheller tells us, changed mobility and mobilized modern life. It enabled air power, the space age and moon landings. Yet, as Sheller makes clear, aluminum was important not only in twentieth-century technology, innovation, architecture, and design but also in underpinning global military power, uneven development, and crucial environmental and health concerns. Sheller describes aluminum's shiny utopia but also its dark side. The unintended consequences of aluminum's widespread use include struggles for sovereignty and resource control in Africa, India, and the Caribbean; the unleashing of multinational corporations; and the pollution of the earth through mining and smelting (and the battle to save it). Using a single material as an entry point to understanding a global history of modernization and its implications for the future, Aluminum Dreams forces us to ask: How do we assemble the material culture of modernity and what are its environmental consequences? Aluminum Dreams includes a generous selection of striking images of iconic aluminum designs, many in color, drawn from advertisements by Alcoa, Bohn, Kaiser, and other major corporations, pamphlets, films, and exhibitions.

Aluminum Upcycled

Author : Carl A. Zimring
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2017-03-15
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9781421421872

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Aluminum Upcycled by Carl A. Zimring Pdf

Tracing the benefits—and limitations—of repurposing aluminum. Besides being the right thing to do for Mother Earth, recycling can also make money—particularly when it comes to upcycling, a zero waste practice where discarded materials are fashioned into goods of greater economic or cultural value. In Upcycling Aluminum, Carl A. Zimring explores how the metal’s abundance after World War II—coupled with the significant economic and environmental costs of smelting it from bauxite ore—led to the industrial production of valuable durable goods from salvaged aluminum. Beginning in 1886 with the discovery of how to mass produce aluminum, the book examines the essential part the metal played in early aviation and the world wars, as well as the troubling expansion of aluminum as a material of mass disposal. Recognizing that scrap aluminum was as good as virgin material and much more affordable than newly engineered metal, designers in the postwar era used aluminum to manufacture highly prized artifacts. Zimring takes us on a tour of post-1940s design, examining the use of aluminum in cars, trucks, airplanes, furniture, and musical instruments from 1945 to 2015. By viewing upcycling through the lens of one material, Zimring deepens our understanding of the history of recycling in industrial society. He also provides a historical perspective on contemporary sustainable design practices. Along the way, he challenges common assumptions about upcycling’s merits and adds a new dimension to recycling as a form of environmental absolution for the waste-related sins of the modern world. Raising fascinating questions of consumption, environment, and desire, Upcycling Aluminum is for anyone interested in industrial and environmental history, discard studies, engineering, product design, music history, or antiques.

Aluminum in America

Author : Quentin R. Skrabec
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2017-02-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9781476625645

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Aluminum in America by Quentin R. Skrabec Pdf

The history of aluminum: metallurgy, engineering, global business and politics—and the advance of civilization itself. The earth’s most abundant metal, aluminum remained largely inaccessible until after the Industrial Revolution. A precious commodity in 1850s, it later became a strategic resource: while steel won World War I, aluminum won World War II. A generation later, it would make space travel possible and the 1972 Pioneer spacecraft would carry a message from mankind to extraterrestrial life, engraved on an aluminum plate. Today aluminum, along with oil, is the natural resource driving geopolitics, and China has taken the lead in manufacture.

Entangled Future Im/mobilities

Author : Daniela Atanasova,Romana Bund,Dovaine Buschmann,Rachael Diniega,Jana Donat,Barbara Gfoellner,Nicola Kopf
Publisher : transcript Verlag
Page : 229 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2024-05-31
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9783839473801

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Entangled Future Im/mobilities by Daniela Atanasova,Romana Bund,Dovaine Buschmann,Rachael Diniega,Jana Donat,Barbara Gfoellner,Nicola Kopf Pdf

How are im/mobilities articulated, imagined and practiced in relation to multiple futures? A critical examination of im/mobilities raises questions as to how power relations and crisis-driven futures enable, inhibit or prevent mobility, what meanings are culturally constructed around im/mobilities and how they are experienced. The contributors to this volume look at entangled future mobilities and immobilities using humanities and social science approaches in diverse examples: Afrofuturist poetry, de-extinction projects, dystopian novels, a Uruguayan planned relocation program, lives of rural Zambian women, climate adaptation in Morocco and Austrian financial literacy policy.

The Metallurgy of Anodizing Aluminum

Author : Jude Mary Runge
Publisher : Springer
Page : 473 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2018-02-01
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9783319721774

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The Metallurgy of Anodizing Aluminum by Jude Mary Runge Pdf

In this book, the history of the concepts critical to the discovery and development of aluminum, its alloys and the anodizing process are reviewed to provide a foundation for the challenges, achievements, and understanding of the complex relationship between the aluminum alloy and the reactions that occur during anodic oxidation. Empirical knowledge that has long sustained industrial anodizing is clarified by viewing the process as corrosion science, addressing each element of the anodizing circuit in terms of the Tafel Equation. This innovative approach enables a new level of understanding and engineering control for the mechanisms that occur as the oxide nucleates and grows, developing its characteristic highly ordered structure, which impact the practical function of the anodic aluminum oxide.

Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia

Author : Kathrin Eitel
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2022-12-06
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000656046

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Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia by Kathrin Eitel Pdf

This book examines the recycling infrastructure in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It considers the circular flows of waste and practices through ‘infracycles’, maintenance practices that tinker with the social and capitalist order, and postcolonial ways of doing politics that co-constitute predominant waste fantasies from which naturecultures ooze out, shaping urban life in their own way. In this context, socially marginalized waste pickers contest the capitalist system by creating tropes about freedom, labor autonomy, and the will to survive. In this regard, they are also meddling about a new social order that represents the fine line Cambodia is sashaying between tradition and modernity. Waste fantasies that are a result of environmental problematizations, however, perpetuate postcolonial ways of doing politics by exuding notions of waste as detached from its sociocultural context. But ultimately, waste slips through the cracks of these dominant imaginaries and global waste reduction models enacting new versions of what waste and the city is, providing opportunities for another future waste policy. This book is a unique contribution to the field of infrastructure studies emphasizing the importance of perceiving infrastructure as circular in smaller ‘infracycles’, rather than linear. It will be of interest to researchers in the field of environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, urban studies, and Southeast Asian studies. The Introduction of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Soil to Foil

Author : Saleem Ali
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 149 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2023-05-23
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780231555562

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Soil to Foil by Saleem Ali Pdf

Aluminum is the most abundant metal in the earth’s crust. It is also ubiquitous in the modern world, from aircraft to soda cans. A dizzying number of consumer and industrial products employ aluminum, typically alloyed, because of its availability, versatility, and malleability. Today, how efficiently we use—and reuse—aluminum is vital to addressing key environmental challenges and understanding humanity’s fraught relationship with the earth. Soil to Foil tells the extraordinary story of aluminum. Saleem H. Ali reveals its pivotal role in the histories of scientific inquiry and technological innovation as well as its importance to sustainability. He offers compelling portraits of the scientists and innovators who discovered new uses for this remarkable element, ranging from chemistry and geoscience to engineering and industrial design. Ali argues that aluminum exemplifies broader lessons about stewardship of nonrenewable resources: its seeming abundance has given rise to wasteful and destructive practices. Soil to Foil follows aluminum’s path along the supply chain, from extraction to production, consumption to recycling. Ali explores the ecological damage at mine sites and visits affected communities seeking to restore the land. He foregrounds the possibilities for more sustainable industrial practices, emphasizing how product design can incorporate eventual reuse and recycling. Ultimately, Soil to Foil shows that the story of aluminum’s use and misuse helps us rethink how to sustainably manage the resources of our planet.

Unearthing Politics

Author : Jason Morris-Jung
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2022-03-08
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9789811631245

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Unearthing Politics by Jason Morris-Jung Pdf

This book examines an important socio-political challenge to the ruling party regime in Vietnam. Vietnam has been the subject of substantial controversy and challenge to the Vietnamese party regime since market reform in the 1980s, especially since the controversy over bauxite mining in the late 2000. Using the environmental dimensions of this problem to highlight a confluence of trends disrupting the nation’s “encrusted politics”, this book open up a space for the in-depth study of the most sensitive issues, bravest activists, and most off limit struggles with the party-state in Vietnam today.

The Matter of History

Author : Timothy J. LeCain
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 367 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2017-09-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9781107134171

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The Matter of History by Timothy J. LeCain Pdf

The Matter of History links the history of people with the history of things through a bold new materialist theory of the past.

The International Aluminium Cartel

Author : Marco Bertilorenzi
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 503 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2015-09-16
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781317804833

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The International Aluminium Cartel by Marco Bertilorenzi Pdf

Aluminium was one of most cartelised industries in the international economic panorama of the 20th century. Born following the discovery of electrolytic smelting process in 1886, this industry, even in its infancy, established a cartel which characterised its history until nearly 1980. Managers of the aluminium industry from various historical eras and countries shared the same vision about the development of their industry: to keep prices as stable as possible in order to encourage expansions and to provide return on investments. Price instability, which characterised the trade of other commodities, was unknown to the aluminium industry. This book neither argues that cartels are fundamentally evil, nor attempts to demonstrate that cartels are optimal business organisations. It instead provides an in-depth and frank analysis of the internal working of industrial organisations and of the interplay between cartels and political powers and institutions. The International Aluminium Cartel offers explanations for the construction and collapse of cartels, descriptions of their operations, and an historical interpretation of their experiences. Incorporating information gleaned from a unique collection of private and public archives from several countries, this unique study will appeal to a wide variety of readers, including academics interested in industrial and business history.

The Political Economy of Russian Aluminium

Author : Jakub M. Godzimirski
Publisher : Springer
Page : 290 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2017-07-18
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9783319572345

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The Political Economy of Russian Aluminium by Jakub M. Godzimirski Pdf

This book addresses how the progress of the Russian aluminium industry, which has developed into an important global actor, has been influenced by the interaction of global market forces and the evolution of the Russian political system. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian aluminium producers needed to adapt to changing framework conditions, both with regards to the global aluminium market and in Russia. Examining the most important changes in the organization of the global aluminium trade – the reorganization and consolidation of Russian aluminium industry and its ‘oligarchization’ – Godzimirski charts the evolution of the relationship between political and economic power in Russia, and the impact that this development has had on survival and adaptation strategies of key aluminium players in the country.

Visuality/Materiality

Author : Divya P. Tolia-Kelly
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 234 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2016-02-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9781317001119

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Visuality/Materiality by Divya P. Tolia-Kelly Pdf

Two of the key theoretical shifts over the past two decades of critical work have been the 'visual turn' and the 'material turn'. This book argues that these hitherto distinct fields should be understood as in continual dialogue and co-constitution and focuses on reconceptualising the visual as an embodied, material, and often politically-charged realm. This edited volume elaborates this conceptual argument through a series of contemporary case studies, drawn from the disciplines of Architecture, Sociology, Media Studies, Geography and Cultural Studies. The case studies included are paired around four themes: consumption, translation, practice and ethics. As well as exploring the bringing together of visuality and materiality studies, the contributors raise questions of social identity and social critique, and also focus on the ethics of material visualities.

Nature at War

Author : Thomas Robertson,Richard P. Tucker,Nicholas B. Breyfogle,Peter Mansoor
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 399 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2020-04-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9781108419765

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Nature at War by Thomas Robertson,Richard P. Tucker,Nicholas B. Breyfogle,Peter Mansoor Pdf

"World War II was the largest and most destructive conflict in human history. It was an existential struggle that pitted irreconcilable political systems and ideologies against one another across the globe in a decade of violence unlike any other. There is little doubt today that the United States had to engage in the fighting, especially after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The conflict was, in the words of historians Allan Millett and Williamson Murray, "a war to be won." As the world's largest industrial power, the United States put forth a supreme effort to produce the weapons, munitions, and military formations essential to achieving victory. When the war finally ended, the finale signaled by atomic mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, upwards of 60 million people had perished in the inferno. Of course, the human toll represented only part of the devastation; global environments also suffered greatly. The growth and devastation of the Second World War significantly changed American landscapes as well. The war created or significantly expanded a number of industries, put land to new uses, spurred urbanization, and left a legacy of pollution that would in time create a new term: Superfund site"--

Surveying the American Tropics

Author : Maria Cristina Fumagalli,Peter Hulme,Owen Robinson,Lesley Wylie
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
Page : 377 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2013-07-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781781387948

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Surveying the American Tropics by Maria Cristina Fumagalli,Peter Hulme,Owen Robinson,Lesley Wylie Pdf

A collection of essays from distinguished international scholars that explore the idea of a literary geography of the American Tropics.