Making and Unmaking Value II: Transformations through Space delves into how the movement of materials across regions reshapes their perceived value and function. Through examining the significance of place, speakers will explore how metals and minerals gain or lose meaning in new cultural or economic contexts. The symposium challenges the notion of fixed value and highlights how materials were reclassified, adapted or resisted integration across geographies.

By analyzing trade routes, crafting practices, local and long-distance exchanges, we explore how materials became seen as foreign, exotic, or ordinary, and how such categories shaped their use and valuation. We will also investigate how the classification of materials shifted—from sacred to utilitarian, or aesthetic to medicinal— as they crossed epistemic or environmental thresholds. The symposium ultimately wishes to emphasize that the value of materials was reworked through spatial entanglements that shaped historical imaginations, material hierarchies, and global asymmetries of power.