Industrial Modernity: Energy, Labor, and Media in 20th Century Asia
The long twentieth century saw staggering economic growth and urbanization in Asia, accompanied with new challenges of industrial modernity. These challenges have been broadly examined in the scholarship of Energy Humanities, Labor Studies, and Science and Technology Studies. Activated in this transformative period in social history, various actors, including farmers, factory workers, engineers, and scientists, interacted with the social, environmental, and political changes by various manners, from welcoming and negotiating, to contesting. We invite proposals that pay attention to how such industrial modernity was invented, constructed, transformed, and propelled by the historical forces of science and technology, colonization, commerce, migration, and social engineering.
Topics of particular interest include but are not limited to:
● Management and agency of workers, worker psychology and Labor Studies
● Everyday life, affect, and the politics in sites of modern industries
● Imperial industry and heritage
● Transnational technocracy and global capital
● Energy Humanities, Environmental History
● Media and Infrastructure Studies
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Peihan Wan
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
peihanw3@illinois.edu------------------------------