The idea for the FAMOSO projects originated in May 2010 when Dr Karin Priem, the principal investigator of the FAMOSO projects, was introduced to a huge holding of 2,251 glass plates archived at the Centre national de l’audiovisuel (CNA) in Dudelange.
The images related to the Luxembourg steel company Aciéries réunies de Burbach-Eich-Dudelange (ARBED), a significant global player in the twentieth-century steel and iron business and Luxembourg’s main driver of socio-cultural transformation and economic prosperity. The glass plates offered a vivid glimpse of the industrial cosmos created by ARBED during the first half of the twentieth century, displaying the company’s impressively varied products, from huge iron and steel constructions to everyday products, its social and educational initiatives, as well as its workers, engineers, founders, and leaders.
The first steps in the design of the FAMOSO projects date back to 2011 and were much stimulated by a booklet entitled Œuvres sociales. Published by ARBED in 1922, the booklet gave a first insight into the wide range of industrialists’ paternalistic and philanthrocapitalist initiatives, which were not only a response to emerging social unrest but also to the economic interdependencies between workers and industrialists. Industrialists were eager to engineer a stable society in times of rapid industrialization and implement a wide range of technologies of identity formation in the “machine age.” An important initial step in the development of the FAMOSO projects was to discover that some of the glass plates of the CNA holding were reproduced in Œuvres sociales, thus revealing strong links to technologies of image reproduction as well as the industrialists’ desire to document and promote their social and educational interventions, and to establish meaning, purpose, and moral superiority through their actions. Retrospectively, this at first sight rather simple discovery of a connection between an illustrated ARBED publication and the images archived in the CNA was a key element in the development of the FAMOSO projects. It showed the importance of visual technologies and the role of images as reproducible and mobile objects in promoting the company’s achievements, also beyond the economic sphere.
Launched in 2013 and 2014 respectively, the FAMOSO projects first focused on the entanglements between industrialization and the cultural, economic, and social transformations in Luxembourg and beyond. Over the course of time, team members discovered new rich and unexplored source materials—for instance, films, photographic albums, posters, corporate brochures, popular magazines, and postcards—that subtly attuned the public to emerging industrial landscapes, modes of production, and new lifestyles and thus helped shape ARBED’s corporate and Luxembourg’s national identity.
In sum, FAMOSO provides a socio-cultural history of industrialization that draws on a wide variety of sources in a non-hierarchical way. Often-neglected visual sources are put on the same plane with textual sources, which opens up new avenues of research on the human body and its senses, the importance of the material world, and innovative technologies in times of industrialization. FAMOSO started its research at the national level in Luxembourg. It soon turned out, however, that national specificities and idiosyncrasies of industrialization were enmeshed and entangled with international trends borrowing and mixing ideas originating in domains such as corporate identity formation, mediatization, scientification, technical innovation, mechanization, capitalism, mass production, medicalization, educationalization, and social utopia.
Accepted conference paper at the fifth European Congress of the European Network in Universal and Global History, Budapest, 31 August–3 September 2017.
Paper at the international conference “Stahl im Film. Ein Medium der (Unternehmens-)Kommunikation im europäischen Vergleich. Ein internationales Symposium.”, 8-10 September 2017, LWL-Industriemuseum Hattingen LVR-Industriemuseum Oberhausen.
Co-authored paper presented at the annual meeting of the international Research Community on Philosophy and History of the Discipline of Education on “Purposes, Projects and Practices of Educational Research: (Re)presentation, Dissemination and Reception”. Free University of Bozen / Bolzano, 19–21 October 2017.
Invited lecture in the framework of the FAMOSO exhibition “La forge d’une socété moderne”, Centre National de l’Audiovisuel, Dudelange, 30 November 2017.
Luxembourg: Centre national de l’audiovisuel, 2017.
Revista de História e Historiografia da Educação 1, no.1 (2017): 44–64.
Paedagogiga Historica 53, no. 3 (2017): 268–284.
In Die Sache(n) der Bildung, edited by Christiane Thompson, Rita Casale and Norbert Ricken, 213–39. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2017.
In Forging a Modern Society: Photography and Corporate Communication in the Industrial Age (ARBED 1911–1937), 10–25. Luxembourg: Centre national de l’audiovisuel, 2017.
Forging a Modern Society: Photography and Corporate Communication in the Industrial Age (ARBED 1911–1937), Centre national de l’audiovisuel (CNA), 10 June – 12 December 2017.
Irma Hadzalic, The Economies of Education: Steel and Iron Corpor(n)ations and the Emergence of Modern Welfare in Luxembourg and in Minas Gerais (c. 1910–1960)
Ira Plein, Picturing Industrial Culture: Visual Communications of Societal Changes in Luxembourg (c. 1890–1940
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