Aluminum shaped the twentieth century. It enabled high-speed travel and gravity-defying flight. It was the material of a streamlined aesthetic that came to represent modernity. And it became an essential ingredient in industrial and domestic products that ranged from airplanes and cars to designer chairs and artificial Christmas trees. It entered modern homes as packaging, foil, pots and pans and even infiltrated our bodies through food, medicine, and cosmetics. In Aluminum Dreams, Mimi Sheller describes how the materiality and meaning of aluminum transformed modern life and continues to shape the world today.
Aluminum, Sheller tells us, changed mobility and mobilized modern life. It enabled air power, the space age and moon landings. Yet, as Sheller makes clear, aluminum was important not only in twentieth-century technology, innovation, architecture, and design but also in underpinning global military power, uneven development, and crucial environmental and health concerns. Sheller describes aluminum's shiny utopia but also its dark side. The unintended consequences of aluminum's widespread use include struggles for sovereignty and resource control in Africa, India, and the Caribbean; the unleashing of multinational corporations; and the pollution of the earth through mining and smelting (and the battle to save it). Using a single material as an entry point to understanding a global history of modernization and its implications for the future, Aluminum Dreams forces us to ask: How do we assemble the material culture of modernity and what are its environmental consequences?
Aluminum Dreams includes a generous selection of striking images of iconic aluminum designs, many in color, drawn from advertisements by Alcoa, Bohn, Kaiser, and other major corporations, pamphlets, films, and exhibitions.
Mimi Sheller examines how people move, how mobile communication changes how people move and how new systems of mobility can actually create immobility. It’s no wonder, then, that she’s designed Drexel’s Center for Mobilities Research and Policy (mCenter) to cross boundaries within disciplines and within Drexel. As the founding director of the mCenter, she works across the university and across nations to better understand these mobilities, which she defines as “the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information across the world, as well as the more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public and private space, and mobile communications.” Her latest book, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (Verso, 2018) [LINK: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2901-mobility-justice], gives a good overview of this new interdisciplinary field.
WHAT BROUGHT YOU TO DREXEL?
After helping to found mobilities research at Lancaster University in the UK, I came back to Philadelphia, where I’m from originally, with the idea of bringing mobilities research, which was really taking off in Europe, into a U.S. academic context. Drexel had a very forward-looking interest in interdisciplinary fields that could draw together its different colleges and schools.
For example, after arriving at Drexel, I worked on a very meaningful project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) on post-earthquake Haiti with colleagues in the department of civil and environmental engineering. It was a project on disaster recovery and participatory engineering—how local knowledge could be mobilized in the post-earthquake situation to work with people there on their water and sanitation needs. There is a real movement in engineering to involve communities in infrastructure decisions, which connects engineering to social science. This led me into a second NSF-funded study on climate change and flooding of two lakes in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
These two research projects now inform my current work on a book called Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene (forthcoming, Duke University Press). Working with colleagues in the Center for Science and Technology Studies has inspired me to shift my work more toward climate change and environmental justice issues, which are crucial to the future of the entire Caribbean region.
IS THAT HOW YOU BECAME INVOLVED WITH THE WORLD BANK IN ADDRESSING DISASTER PREPAREDNESS?
After we did the project in Haiti, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) invited me to a workshop they had organized on behalf of the NSF to review all of the teams that had worked in post-earthquake Haiti. They asked me to co-chair the meeting in October 2010, about nine months after the earthquake. Then the World Bank invited the EERI to bring a team of international experts to Tokyo to work with Japanese agencies on lessons learned from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Specifically, the World Bank wanted lessons for developing countries. They invest a lot of program funding in development projects, and they realized that development needs to take disaster preparedness into account, especially in these days of climate change and severe weather events. Large-scale development projects can be impacted by disaster, and countries can use development planning and funding to help prepare for floods and hurricanes and tsunamis and droughts—whatever disaster might strike.
“THERE IS A REAL MOVEMENT IN ENGINEERING TO INVOLVE COMMUNITIES IN INFRASTRUCTURE DECISIONS, WHICH CONNECTS ENGINEERING TO SOCIAL SCIENCE.”
A team of 12 of us—four from the U.S., including myself—went to Tokyo and had an amazing set of sessions with representatives from the World Bank, the Japanese government, and Japanese NGOs that had been involved in disaster response. They presented a lot of information on what they had learned, and we advised them on translating that into something useful for developing countries.
The final version was presented at the World Bank/International Monetary Fund (IMF) annual meeting in Japan in October 2012, and given to all the member states of the IMF and the World Bank so that they incorporate these lessons into future development.
HOW CAN SOMEONE LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MCENTER?
We sponsor an occasional Mobility Visiting Speaker Series, which is open to the public. Follow our news at, mCenter @ Drexel on Facebook, or @mCenterDrexel on Twitter, to get involved.
Mimi Sheller, AB Harvard University (1988), MA (1993) and PhD (1997) New School for Social Research, is a professor of sociology and founding Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University. She is the past President of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (2014-2017), co-editor of the journal Mobilities, which she co-founded in 2006, and associate editor of Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies.
She is author of twelve books, including most recently Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (Verso, 2018); Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity (MIT Press, 2014) and Citizenship from Below (Duke University Press, 2012); and the co-edited volumes Mobilities and Complexities (2018); Mobilities Intersections (2018); The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (2013) and Mobility and Locative Media (2014). As founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities, Associate Editor of Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, co-editor of "Mobile Technologies of the City" (2006) and "Tourism Mobilities" (2004), and author of several highly cited articles, she helped established the new interdisciplinary field of mobilities research.
She is currently completing the book Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene, for Duke University Press, about post-disaster recovery and climate adaptation, with a focus on Haiti. With a production grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Research in the Fine Arts she is co-producing a documentary film on bauxite mining and aluminum, Fly Me to the Moon, with director Esther Figueroa.
In Fall 2016 she was Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Center for Advanced Research on Global Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication. She was awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa from Roskilde University, Denmark (2015) and has held Visiting Fellowships at the Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University, UK (2005-2012); the Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University (2008); Media@McGill, Canada (2009); the Center for Mobility and Urban Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark (2009); and the Penn Humanities Forum, University of Pennsylvania (2010).
She has been awarded research funding from the US National Science Foundation for two projects collaborating with engineers and hydrologists on post-earthquake humanitarian responses in Haiti (2010-2012) and adaptation to climate change in Haiti and the Dominican Republic (2012-2013). Based on this work she was invited to co-chair the NSF review of all Haiti RAPID grants, and served as an expert advisor to the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction in its preparation of a report with the Government of Japan on the Japanese Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami.
She also was awarded grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the New School’s Janey Program, and the University of Michigan’s Center for African and African-American Studies to support her PhD dissertation and first book, Democracy After Slavery (Macmillan, 2000), winner of the Choice outstanding book award. In the UK she was awarded grants from the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for her book Consuming the Caribbean (Routledge, 2003), a history of transatlantic circulation and consumption. Her recently complete research project, ImagineTrains, was supported by the Mobile Lives Forum (Paris), where she also serves on the International Scientific Board.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:
SOLE-AUTHORED BOOKS
EDITED BOOKS
JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUES CO-EDITED
SELECTED REFEREED JOURNAL ARTICLES
