[Sci-tech-public] STS Circle, February 25 - Hanna Rose Shell (Please RSVP)

[STS]

STS Circle at Harvard
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Hanna Rose Shell
MIT, STS

on
Shoddy Heap: Textile Waste, Devil’s Dust, and Alien Flora


Monday, February 25
12:15-2:00 p.m.
Pierce Hall, 29 Oxford Street, Room 100F

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Lunch is provided if you RSVP.
Please RSVP to sts<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu>@hks.harvard.edu<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu> by 5pm Wednesday, February 20.

Abstract: “Shoddy” came into existence as a noun to refer to a repurposed textile material produced from old rags and tailors’ clippings. It is said that a West Yorkshire mill-owner, inspired by a chance encounter with a horse saddle stuffed with shredded tunics, “invented” shoddy in 1813. Industrial-style recycling was born alongside the development of machinery for the sorting, grinding, scouring and baling of old, used, usable wool. Over the next hundred and fifty years, wool shoddy –and permutations thereof – was widely used in the production of new suits, slaves’ clothing, sofa stuffing, and agricultural fertilizer. People, machines, and landscapes were reconfigured so as best to recycle waste and other leftovers into plentiful “new” raw materials. From old clothes came new technologies of survival, coverings for the human skin, and ingredients to transform barren soil into lush fields of rhubarb, beer hops, and invasive weeds. This paper examines technological and natural repurposing through analysis of the historical production, consumption, and disposal of a quasi-object defined by its reuse.


Biography:Hanna Rose Shell, a historian of science and technology, is the Leo Marx Career Development Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, and an affiliate in Comparative Media Studies.  Shell studies the production, use, and transformation of often-marginalized artifacts, located at the interstices of the found and the fabricated.  Her current book project is a historical and theoretical investigation into the epistemology of reuse, in which objects of analysis include old clothes, decomposing vegetable matter, and other artifacts of strategic repurposing. Shell holds an MA in American Studies (Yale), and earned a PhD in the History of Science (Harvard), after which she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Recent works include the article “Cinehistory and Experiments on Film,” published in Journal of Visual Culture (2012) and the book Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography and the Media of Reconnaissance, published by Zone Books in 2012.



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