This symposium series investigates the dynamic and entangled histories of metals and minerals, focusing on their complex life cycles as materials that are continually made, used, transformed, and remade across diverse social, cultural, and ecological contexts. Moving beyond approaches that isolate provenance or fixed material value, the series foregrounds the processes by which metals and minerals acquire meaning, shift in function, and mediate relationships between human and natural worlds. Across five interconnected events, we explore how these materials implicate and invite knowledgeable intervention and skilled work, and the transformative part they play in making and unmaking landscapes.
A key conceptual thread weaving the series together is the notion of transformation—not only of materials themselves but also of the values, practices, and knowledges that surround them. The first two symposia, Making and Unmaking Value I and II, challenge static ideas of worth, showing how metals and minerals gain or lose significance through cycles of use, repair, decay, and geographic movement.These events explore temporal and spatial reconfigurations of value, revealing materials as flexible, mutable entities shaped by cultural, political, and ecological forces.
Building on this, the third symposium, Crafted Forms, Skillful Doing, examines the embodied labor of craft as a site of material and intellectual transformation. Skilled craftspeople selected, harvested, and transformed metals and minerals with a variety of characteristics to produce artifacts that were circulated and repurposed over the course of rich use-lives.We invite scholars to bring different disciplinary perspectives to bear on these transformative practices as they pertain to a range of activities (from alloying to pigment-making) and artifacts (from textiles to grave goods). Craft here emerges as a vital site where matter, technique, and meaning intersect.
The series further deepens this inquiry through Assaying and the Sensorium, the fourth symposium, which centers the senses as essential tools of judgment. In many contexts, sensory engagement with metals and minerals—through sight, touch, sound, and smell—shaped the ways in which the qualities and potentials of materials were apprehended and defined. We pay attention to how descriptions of metals and minerals that implicate a sensory engagement enable a different perspective on questions of assaying and measurement so closely associated with activities such as mining, assaying, smelting, and alloying.
Finally, the fifth symposium, Landscapes, Raw Materials, and Residues expands the frame to consider how extraction and processing transform not only materials but also environments and epistemologies. It investigates the enduring impact of residues—slag, dust, pollutants—as both ecological agents and historical traces, complicating binaries between raw and finished, natural and cultural. The symposium invites reflection on the longue-durée histories of landscapes of extraction. This entails an attention to processes that unfold over multiple scales, and entangle a variety of agentive forces.
Together, the symposia present metals and minerals as living materials with multifaceted biographies that traverse geographies, sensory worlds, craft traditions, and environmental histories. They invite us to rethink materials as dynamic participants in knowledge production and socio-ecological change.
