Doctoral Dissertation Grant: A History of the American Cement and Concrete Industries

George Washington University, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports a proposal for a doctoral dissertation research project to develop a history of concrete that includes its global, material, and cultural aspects. The project will examine how American businessmen, scientists, and workers defined good concrete, and how they transmitted the material, the technologies necessary for its manufacture, and the knowledge about labor practices to different building communities around the world. The project supported by this award will track the discovery of cement rock in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania, the expansion of the industry to the American South, the formation of the concrete empire in the Global South, and the potential use of concrete for colonizing outer space. The dissertation argues that for cement to be successful, it had to mix with other industries like agriculture, the military, and science to spread invisibly and seemingly naturally. Funding will be used to conduct research at government, private, and university archives. The dissertation argues that for cement to be successful, it had to mix with other industries like agriculture, the military, and science to spread invisibly and seemingly naturally. Funding will be used to conduct research at government, private, and university archives. The results of this research are to be presented at professional conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals. They will also serve to illuminate the extent to which materials selected for building efforts have a significant impact on neighboring residents; in doing so, they may serve to empower members of the general public to participate in environmental monitoring, to engage in broader conversations about air quality, and to participate in scientific knowledge production. Such activities are especially important for marginalized communities, which have been historically relegated to living in polluted regions often without knowledge of its looming toxicity. This research project will support a history of technology project that examines the American cement and concrete industries. Unlike coal and other alike industrial substances that have received extensive historical coverage, concrete has been ignored under the assumption that it lacks history and importance. By taking concrete itself as the key problematic, as opposed to its testing or use in design, the results of this project will contribute to the growing literature on the movement of materials across the world and their political and environmental consequences. In addition to introducing concrete to Science and Technology Studies scholarship, it may serve to transform the field by expanding how scholars think about the development of knowledge communities. The project shows that to understand the complexity of knowledge communities, scholars need to look beyond professional hierarchies and think about the physical, bodily, and geographical networks of people and places. By rooting the experiences of scientists, quarrymen, carceral laborers, farmers, and soldiers in the material geographies of concrete manufacture, this project will reveal how cement and concrete industries constructed ideas about skill, knowledge, and who was able to acquire it. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.