Concrete and Plastic: Thinking through Materiality

Plastic and concrete are two of the most ubiquitous materials of the modern age. This open access book traces inventions, inventories and interventions of these materials as they pervade our day-to-day lives across various forms. By proposing we think of the ways materials configure 'future artefacts', and by recognizing the various ways in which materials shape our encounters with the world, the book explores the productive tensions implicit in, and between, concrete and plastic. Drawing ona wide range of sources, including novels, essays, travel and nature writings, films, poems, souvenirs, advertisements, policy documents, environmental art, wrapping,and (popular) science writing, the book attends to all kinds of cultural artefacts to trace imaginative entanglements with disparate others in the Anthropocene. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com Open access was funded by The University of Rostock.

Introduction Chapter 1. Plastic Pacific Chapter 2. Megadam Materialites Chapter 3. Unpacking Plastic Chapter 4. Concrete Ruins Conclusion Bibliography