Trace Material

FAIN: TR-271444-20

New School (New York, NY 10011-8871)
Alison Mears (Project Director: January 2020 to June 2022)

Production of six thirty-minute episodes on the social history of plastic products.

Parsons Healthy Materials Lab (HML) requests a grant in support of Trace Material, a serial podcast that explores the intersection of our lives and the lives of the materials that surround us. The podcast evolved from materials research in the Lab that identified a gap in understanding of the common materials that surround us, the history of their development and their intersection with our lives. The materials we surround ourselves with have a major impact on our health, but they also tell us complex human stories about the world we live in.

Associated Products

Trace Materials Season 2 (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)
Title: Trace Materials Season 2
Director: Alison Mears
Producer: Burgess Brown
Abstract: Throughout the period of performance, the podcast team at Healthy Materials Lab conducted research and interviews, and scripted, recorded, and produced seven episodes of Trace Material that culminated in the release of the second season of the podcast. We set out to tell the complex and nuanced social history of plastics in the US by working in the tradition of material culture studies and highlighting humanities themes of feminism, futurism, and consumerism. To accomplish this we spoke to a broad range of guests that included historians, politicians, lawyers, Tupperware saleswomen, and highschool activists. In all, sixteen guests joined us in season two and represented a diversity of age, race, gender and plastics expertise/background that aligns with the ubiquitous story of plastics. As a research and storytelling framework, we chose a specific plastic object to focus on for each episode. In our initial application, the objects we highlighted were: Bakelite, Tupperware, PVC, the microwave oven, the Monsanto House of the Future, and Cellulose.
Date: 9/30/21
Primary URL: https://healthymaterialslab.org/projects/podcast
Primary URL Description: All episodes from the second season of Trace Material that were produced during the course of the project can be found here: healthymaterialslab.org/podcast Each episode has its own webpage that includes teaser text, an embed of the episode audio, links to various streaming platforms, a gallery of relevant images, a transcript of the episode, and resources for further reading on the stories covered.
Access Model: Open access Podcast
Format: Other

---