'The Pollution Bandwagon': The Fight Against Car Pollution in Montreal in the 1960s-1970s
09 April 2018, 6:00 pm
Event Information
Open to
- All
Organiser
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UCL Institute of the Americas
Valérie Poirier is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph and a member of the Montreal History Group. She specialises in the social, environmental and urban history of twentieth century Quebec. She recently completed a PhD in history at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), in which she examined how the car came to be perceived as an environmental risk in Montreal during the long sixties. With Stéphane Savard (UQAM), she co-edited a special issue of the Bulletin d'histoire politique on environmental activism in Quebec, in which she also published an article focusing on the citizen-led opposition to the construction of the Ville-Marie expressway in Montreal in the early 1970s. Her current research explores the new ways of conceptualising noise in the after-war period, from 1945 to 1980. It seeks to understand why the meanings associated with noise shifted and how noise was gradually conceptualised as the fourth type of pollution, following water, air and soil pollution.