Residues: Thinking Through Chemical Environments

Residues: Thinking Through Chemical Environments

By Soraya Boudia, Angela N H Creager, and Scott Frickel
Paperback
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Winner of the 2023 Merton Award from the Science, Knowledge, and Technology section of the American Sociological Association

Residues offers readers a new approach for conceptualizing the environmental impacts of chemicals production, consumption, disposal, and regulation. Environmental protection regimes tend to be highly segmented according to place, media, substance, and effect; academic scholarship often reflects this same segmented approach. Yet, in chemical substances we encounter phenomena that are at once voluminous and miniscule, singular and ubiquitous, regulated yet unruly. Inspired by recent studies of materiality and infrastructures, we introduce "residual materialism" as a framework for attending to the socio-material properties of chemicals and their world-making powers. Tracking residues through time, space, and understanding helps us see how the past has been built into our present chemical environments and future-oriented regulatory systems, why contaminants seem to always evade control, and why the Anthropocene is as inextricably harnessed to the synthesis of carbon into new molecules as it is driven by carbon's combustion.

Details

Publish date December 31, 2021
Publisher Rutgers University Press
Format Paperback
Pages 200
ISBN 9781978818019
1978818017

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