Residues: Thinking Through Chemical Environments [Hardcover]

Winner of the 2023 Merton Award from the Science, Knowledge, and Technology section of the American Sociological Association

Residuesoffers 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.Residuesoffers readers a new approach for conceptualizing the environmental impacts of chemicals production, consumption, disposal, and regulation. With detailed stories that span the globe, we introduce “residual materialism” as a way to track the, often invisible, impacts of chemicals through time and space and for explaining their world-making powers.SORAYA BOUDIA is a professor of sociology at the University of Paris in France. She has authored, co-authored, and co-edited numerous books. She is currently studying the the global environmental crisis and the political economy of toxic waste in the MENA region.
 
ANGELA N.H. CREAGER is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science at Princeton University in New Jersey. She is co-editor lC9