Michael Matthews presented his paper "La historia cultural del auge de los ferrocarriles en la época porfiriana: patrimonio intangible del cambio tecnológico en México" ( The Cultural History of the Porfirian Railway Boom: An Intangible Patrimony of Technological Change in Mexico) at the Semanario Internacional: Paisajes Culturales y Patrimonio en San Luis Potosí, México.
His paper discussed how the arrival of the railway in nineteenth-century Mexico reshaped people’s understandings of time, space, gender, and sexuality as well as the relationship between the public and private realm, the countryside and city, and tradition and modernity.