The vital materiality of aluminum: light modernity and the global Atlantic
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AbstractThis article considers the significance of new ontological approaches to vibrant materialities and to mobilities research for re-thinking the globality of the Atlantic world. It does so through a study of bauxite mining and aluminum smelting as an agent of globalization and a mobile materialization of uneven global modernities. Aluminum can be thought of not just as an inert metal that is acted upon, but as a complex agent enrolled into transnational circuits, structuring and structured by the connections between them. The first section begins by sketching the idea of the global Atlantic; the second section focuses on methods of “following things” as a productive way of doing global history; and the third gives a brief account of the mobilities and materialities of aluminum based in part on the author's book Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity. In following the material assemblages and energetic transformations of bauxite/aluminum, this account seeks to bring to light the long-distance trans-oceanic relations that connect Atlantic political economies into global political ecologies.Keywords: AlcoaAlcanbauxite mininghydroelectric powermobilitiestransportation AcknowledgementsI would like to thank all of the participants in the Atlantic Studies: Global Currents workshop at City University of Hong Kong for their comments on an earlier draft. Some parts of this work draw on my book Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity (MIT Press, 2014), whose editors and production team I also thank. For assistance in locating primary materials in the Alcoa Archives I thank Chief Librarian Art Louderback at the Senator John Heinz History Center Library and Archives in Pittsburgh, PA.Notes on contributorDr. Mimi Sheller is Professor of Sociology and founding Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University. She is founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities and Associate Editor of the journal Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies. She serves on the Scientific Board of the Mobile Lives Forum, SNCF, France and on the Michelin Challenge Bibendum Task Force on Connected Mobility. As co-editor, with John Urry, of Mobile Technologies of the City (Routledge, 2006), Tourism Mobilities (Routledge, 2004) and several key articles, she helped to establish the new interdisciplinary field of mobilities research. Sheller also publishes extensively in the field of Caribbean Studies, including the books Democracy After Slavery (Macmillan, 2000); Consuming the Caribbean (Routledge, 2003); Citizenship from Below (Duke University Press, 2012); and Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity (MIT Press, 2014).Notes1. CitationBennett, Vibrant Matter, viiii.2. These are Deleuze and Guattari's terms from their “Treatise on Nomadology,” as cited by CitationBennett, Vibrant Matter, viiii.3. See CitationSheller and Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm”, CitationCresswell and Merriman, Geographies of Mobilities.4. CitationCurtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex; CitationMintz, Sweetness and Power.5. CitationMorton, The Poetics of Spice; CitationSchivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise.6. Other works that give a certain degree of agency to plants or animals include CitationCrosby, The Columbian Exchange; CitationKurlansky, Cod; and CitationPollan, Botany of Desire.7. This formulation is influenced by actor-network theory and science and technology studies, including CitationBijker et al., The Social Construction of Technological Systems; CitationBijker and Law, Shaping Technology/Building Society; CitationSuchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations; and CitationLatour, Politics of Nature.8. Although recent popular global histories of ores and metals have brought more attention to such substances, e.g., CitationGoodell, Big Coal; CitationZoellner, Uranium.9. CitationHannam et al., “Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings”; CitationSheller and CitationUrry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm”; CitationUrry, Sociology Beyong Societies; and CitationUrry, Mobilities.10. Adey, Mobility; CitationCresswell, On the Move; CitationCresswell and Merriman, Geographies of Mobilities; and CitationUrry, Mobilities.11. CitationSheller, Aluminum Dreams.12. CitationCrosby, The Columbian Exchange; CitationSheller, Consuming the Caribbean.13. CitationGrove, Green Imperialism.14. CitationAnderson, Imagined Communities.15. CitationGilroy, The Black Atlantic; CitationCarney, Black Rice; and CitationGoucher, “Memory of Iron.”16. CitationRoach, Cities of the Dead, 4–5.17. CitationArmitage and Braddick, The British Atlantic World.18. CitationBraudel, The Mediterranean.19. CitationSheller, Consuming the Caribbean.20. CitationFumagalli et al., Surveying the American Tropics.21. CitationFerguson, “Global Disconnect,” 142. See CitationSmith, “Satanic Geographies of Globalization.”22. CitationHeld et al., Global Transformations, 8.23. CitationHamilton, “Production Costs Drive Industries Offshore,” 4E.24. CitationPrice, Travels with Tooy; CitationPrice, Rainforest Warriors.25. CitationMeikle, American Plastic; CitationMisa, Nation of Steel; and CitationNye, American Technological Sublime.26. CitationMisa, Nation of Steel, 283, 273.27. CitationRodgers et al., Cultures in Motion.28. CitationAppadurai, Modernity at Large.29. CitationNye, American Technological Sublime.30. CitationHachez-Leroy, L'Aluminium français, 138.31. CitationAluminium Company of Canada Ltd., Aluminium Panorama, 35.32. CitationAluminium Company of Canada Ltd., Aluminium Panorama, 45.33. CitationAluminium Company of Canada Ltd., Aluminium Panorama, 45–47, including a fascinating map depicting the routes of bauxite ore, refined alumina, and aluminum ingot across the Atlantic sites described, plus a Caribbean route heading through Panama to the Pacific.34. CitationAluminium Company of Canada Ltd., Aluminium Panorama, 51.35. CitationBennett, Vibrant Matter, 60.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it