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.
Author(s): Soraya Boudia, Angela N. H. Creager, Scott Frickel, Emmanuel Henry, Nathalie Jas, Carsten Reinhardt, Jody A. Roberts
Series: Nature, Society, and Culture
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 200
City: New Brunswick
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Acronyms and Abbreviations
1. Residue Properties
2. Legacy
3. Accretion
4. Apprehension
5. Residual Materialism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Authors
Available titles in the Nature, Society, and Culture series
