Building Freshness: Refrigerated Space for Foodways and Techno-Politics in Treaty-Port Shanghai

Date: 11 Oct 2024

Time: 2:30 PM –3:30 PM

Venue: SDE3 Level 4 LT 427

Building Freshness: Refrigerated Space for Foodways and Techno-Politics in Treaty-Port Shanghai

This talk derives from my current book project, which aims to historicize the foodscape shaped by the adoption of mechanical refrigeration in treaty-port Shanghai from the late 19th century to the 1940s when society encountered and started embracing the artificial cold.

From public venues to private premises, refrigerated space, as a constellation of socio-technical systems, empowered diverse subjects and created a contact zone that linked the interest of every actor embedded in transnational networks. It participated as an infrastructure in modernizing the foodway, a process infused with mediation and friction at local and global levels contesting the incomplete cold chain, which is commonplace nowadays.

Zhengfeng Wang is a historian of the built environment, currently serving as a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University and as a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies – Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme program.

Trained as an architect, Wang has accumulated study and work experience in Shanghai, Barcelona, and Dublin. Her research explores the intersection of science and technology studies, consumption and consumer culture, and environment and society.

She has received support from the Irish Research Council, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Global Urban History Project.