Making and Unmaking Value I (November 2025) & II (April 2026) explore how the concept of use—rather than intrinsic or origin-based value—can serve as a critical lens for rethinking materials and their histories. Moving beyond conventional frameworks grounded in provenance, extraction, and regional moral or financial economies, the Making and Unmaking Value symposia explore how materials, such as metals and minerals (including precious and semiprecious stones) accrue or lose value through changes in form, function, and meaning.

Metals and minerals offer particularly illuminating case studies for historical reorientation due to their multifaceted trajectories of use across diverse cultures. Some societies perpetuated stable forms of these materials, while others embraced malleability, assigning value based on the materials’ capacity for endless reconfiguration. Examining the circumstances that lead to the assignment of a material to one of the binaries in this dichotomy allows us to better understand issues of permanence, utility, and worth, which have been negotiated in varying temporal and spatial contexts throughout history.

Making and Unmaking Value is structured in two parts, each addressing a distinct axis of transformation:

Making and Unmaking Value I – Transformations Through Time, Harvard University, November 2025

This symposium will engage with the ways in which the assessment of materials is affected by temporal transformations (imagined or real), encompassing cycles of use, reuse, repair, repurposing, and decay. It will explore how the significance of materials and objects is shaped by the labor invested, their durability or degradation, and the cultural meanings assigned to their persistence or obsolescence. From fossilization and preservation to processes of forgetting and fragmentation, this segment will investigate the role played by time in shaping societal values.