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.
“Lime-land”, Wuppertal-Dornap
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 first bits and pieces of my research results at our history department’s colloquium. I have tried to present an outline of what remains to be written over the next couple of years and read some short exemplary passages of what I have written during the last week. The prospects were grand - to say the least - but it felt good. Criticism was extremely productive and motivating!
Went through the first decades of the Zeitschrift für praktische Geologie starting in 1893 at the Bergbau Bibliothek in Bochum today. Even though I found disappointingly little on lime or lignite mining, I found that this journal is an interesting source. I was especially struck by the many contributions that are apparently part of a colonialist agenda. Many notes about resources being discovered in Asia, Africa and Latin America. It would probably be worth going through the journal more systematically - if i only had the time to do so…
Spent the latter part of the week in the Landesarchiv NRW working on some files of the county authorities that supervised quarries. A lot of repetitions: neighbors complaining about rock blasting and negotiations about proper workers’ safety. Finally I took a look at a record on the cleansing of local creeks, but interestingly found no reference to mining related pollution that I had expected.
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.
I have been awarded a one-year research grant by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung. The title of the project I applied with is: “Ressourcenverbrauch und Rearrangement des Raums: Praktiken und Materialität des Tagebaus um 1900”
The funding will begin in September and I hope to be able to collect archival material and write a first journal article. Later, the research from this project can be easily feed into a more comprehensive analysis of how to grasp practices and materiality in history. For the moment, this is certainly a great point of depature!
One of the pictures from my road-trip to the lignite mines last week. I took my colleague Sonya Duus who works on Australian open pit mining to see the European counterparts.
Completed another week in the archives. Things are going ahead: It’s fascinating to see, how lime companies went about in acquiring land for their quarries. I am starting to see different patterns and strategies.
Just got back from the conference History Underground, held at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. It was the first time I presented my new project and some very preliminary results - the responses were quite encouraging. Besides, I got to know many people working in the field of an environmental history of mining and got an insight into the discussions going on in that community. Still, I discovered that most issues discussed there are not really what I am interested in doing in my own work - so yet again an indicator to clearly distinguish my project from mining history.
Completed four days of work in the archives. The lime mining company Rheinkalk has one of the most impressive collections of records on property evaluation and transactions dating back all the way to the 1850s. I am grateful to be allowed to use them.
The lignite waste soil tip and power stations near Grevenbroich seen from about 40km away. The size of these human-made landscapes is truly impressive.
I have been using the TIM-online website and especially the topographical maps drawn between 1891 and 1912 quite a bit lately to identify names of places that have meanwhile been dug away.
