The program for the conference “Wahrnehmung, Kommunikation und Bewaeltigung industrieller Katastrophen vom 18. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert. Bergbau - Chemieindustrie - Kernenergie” in Konstanz has been published. I will contribute a presentation on the strategies and policies that prevented disasters in the lime mining industry.
My conference report on the young researchers’ conference of the Gesellschaft für Stadtgeschichte und Urbanisierungsforschung has just been published in the latest issue of the Informationen zur modernen Stadtgeschichte.
Tagungsbericht: GSU-Nachwuchstagung und Workshop „Stadt und Moderne“, Darmstadt (22.-23.9.2011), in: Informationen zur modernen Stadtgeschichte 2011/2, 105-107.
Eva-Maria Roelevink has written a report on the conference on ”Industrialisation in European Regions” that took place in Bochum last November. It is interesting and in a way pleasing to read what she writes about my presentation there: “Einen Abstraktionsschritt weiter ging SEBASTIAN HAUMANN (Darmstadt), indem er programmatisch die Frage verfolgte, inwieweit ‘Materialität’ und ‘soziale Konstruktion’ im Verhältnis stehen. […] Obgleich Haumann sich seiner eher unkonventionellen Sichtweise im Kanon der bisherigen Regionalisierungsdebatte bewusst ist, folgerte er „Regionen“ im Zusammenhang ihrer materiellen Umwelt zu definieren.”
Presented at the conference on Industrial Regions in Bochum yesterday. The whole conference seems to be dominated by economic historians. On the positive side, I am getting another insight into how economic history deals with space. On the negative side, these attempts to describe regions from an economic perspective are for the most part not very innovative and often not very convincing. It is mostly “container” space and it is easy to make out the flaws of such concepts, even when focussing on economic history. But on a whole, the conference made me think about my own work on surface mining again.
yesterday I took part in a meeting at the Deutsche Bergbaumuseum. A group of institutions that are working in the filed of the history of technology and planning history is currently digitizing parts of their archival holdings. The documents will be available as high resolution images on the internet. The documents they will pull together seem to be very heterogenous, ranging from sketches used to construct V2 missiles in the 1930s to landscape plans prepared in the GDR. I was invited to comment on what the overall use for scientific research interested in space could be in working with these documents.
Writing a conference report on the young researchers conference on urban history that took place in Darmstadt three weeks ago. Thinking about the conference in retrospective, it is surprising how well all the presentations fit together and how lively the discussions were. Of course this is difficult to depict in a conference report, but I’ll try.
The report will be published in the next informationen zur modernen Stadtgeschichte.
Will be speaking at the upcoming conference in Bochum on 9 November: “The Industrial Reconstruction of Space: Lignite Pits and Lime Quarries in the Rhineland, ca. 1900”
I have sent in a paper proposal for this conference in Constance. The questions the organizers raise seem very relevant for my own work - even though I don’t really know much about disasters. It’s the idea that one can only understand these disasters in their complexity if one pays attention to the physical characteristics of the material involved. Hopefully I will be invited to say something about lime in that regard.
The Urban History Group seeks papers for their 2012 conference in Oxford. The theme of the conference is “The Living and Liveable City: Health, Lifestyle and Sustainability”.
Nice conference report by Reinhild Kreis on “Writing Post-1970 History: Conceptualizing the Late Twentieth Century in German and American Historiography”. Seems like it would have been interesting to have participated in that workshop. Contrasting German and US historiography on the 1970 makes sense. So many similar developments have been interpreted in such different ways.
It seems like the general public is interested in modernist architecture now. Nice summary of our conference. Even I made it into the TAZ - who would have thought?
The European Association of Urban History renewed its homepage. It now includes a directory of all papers given at the EAUH conference from 1992. It also seems like the urban history community has constantly been growing over the last two decades.
Off to Berlin to present a paper on “Image Construction and Decline of West-German Public Housing, 1960s-1970s.”. I did quite some extra research for that presentation over the last weeks - primarily going through architectural journals. It’s probably enough material o write an article and maybe it can even serve as the basis for an application for research funding - we’ll see …
I am also looking forward to the conference because Stefanie Herold and Biljana Stefanovska want to initiate some kind of network. This could be a great chance to get a discussion going between architects and historians working on post 1945 architecture.
What a great atmosphere at the European Society for Environmental History here in Turku. It is really easy to get in touch with all kinds of people - and that’s what conferences are about, aren’t they. Also heard some interesting presentations and discussions (especially Heike Weber’s small session on waste was very inspiring for me). It’s also an interesting experience to be in Finland: some of my expectations have been proved wrong - people do speak quite a bit ;) Besides Turku is a an interesting city with some elements that remind me of small cities in the north of the US and some elements that resemble eastern Europe. Well, I guess that’s no surprise considering Finish history.
