About the Book
The contributors to Reactivating Elements examine chemicals as they mix with soil, air, water, and fire to shape Earth's troubled ecologies today. They invoke the elements with all their ambivalences as chemical categories, material substances, social forms, forces and energies, cosmological entities, and epistemic objects. Engaging with the nonlinear historical significance of elemental thought across fields-chemistry, the biosciences, engineering, physics, science and technology studies, the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and cultural studies-the contributors examine the relationship between chemistry and ecology, probe the logics that render wind as energy, excavate affective histories of ubiquitous substances such as plastics and radioactive elements, and chart the damage wrought by petrochemical industrialization. Throughout, the volume illuminates how elements become entangled with power and control, coloniality, racism, and extractive productivism while exploring alternative paths to environmental destruction. In so doing, it rethinks the relationship between the elements and the elemental, human and more-than-human worlds, today’s damaged ecosystems and other ecologies to come.
Contributors. Patrick Bresnihan, Tim Choy, Joseph Dumit, Cori Hayden, Stefan Helmreich, Joseph Masco, Michelle Murphy, Natasha Myers, Dimitris Papadopoulos, MarÍa Puig de la Bellacasa, Astrid Schrader, Isabelle Stengers
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Elements: From Cosmology to Episteme and Back / Dimitris Papadopoulos, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and Natasha Myers 1
1. Receiving the Gift: Earthly Events, Chemical Invariants, and Elemental Powers / Isabelle Stengers 18
2. Chemicals, Ecology, and Reparative Justice / Dimitris Papadopoulos 34
3. Elementary Forms of Elementary Forms: Old, New, and Wavy / Stefan Helmreich 70
4. Substance as Method: Bromine, for Example / Joseph Dumit 84
5. Elemental Ghosts, Haunted Carbon Imaginaries, and Living Matter at the Edge of Life / Astrid Schrader 108
6. The Artificial World / Joseph Masco 131
7. Tilting at Windmills / Patrick Bresnihan 151
8. Crowding the Elements / Cori Hayden 176
9. Embracing Breakdown: Soil Ecopoethics and the Ambivalences of Remediation / Maria Puig de la Bellcasa 196
10. Externality, Breathers, Conspiracy: Forms for Atmospheric Reckoning / Tim Choy 231
11. Reimagining Chemicals, With and Against Technoscience / Michelle Murphy 257
Contributors 280
Index 285
About the Author :
Dimitris Papadopoulos is Professor of Science, Technology and Society at the University of Nottingham.
MarÍa Puig de la Bellacasa is Associate Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick.
Natasha Myers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University.
Review :
“This is a book populated by many of my favorite writers, analysts, and storytellers. Here, they resituate elemental things for me once again. The book is a kind of periodic table for recharting possible responses to Earth’s troubled ecologies with verve and seriousness. These writers always take formal, aesthetic, and intellectual risks to say something important, and they have done it again. The book provokes curiosity because its authors are actually curious rather than self certain. Reactivating Elements is a book to savor!” - Donna J. Haraway, author of (Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene) “Expanding on critiques of the Anthropocene, this compelling volume refreshingly offers new theoretical and methodological approaches to researching and responding to the multiple toxicities of late industrialism.” - Sara Ann Wylie, author of (Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds) “Tracking waves and wind, bromine, plutonium, and plastics-elemental thinking becomes a way to unsettle long-established category schemes and ways of working. Starting with a critique of how the periodic table itself organizes knowledge and practice, the collection shows how elemental thinking can become creative and animating rather than formulaic, provocative and generative rather than reductive and foreclosing. Paradoxes abound and are a powerful draw for contemporary cultural analysts.” - Kim Fortun, author of (Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders) “The diversity of detailed subjects, methods, and philosophical underpinnings represented here ensures that most readers will find these well-written, engaging essays inspiring and challenging. . . . [Reactivating Elements] belongs in all good scholarly libraries, especially those with strong collections in science and technology studies (STS), science writing, and/or cultural criticism. Highly recommended.” - D. Bantz (Choice) "This is a book one could approach slowly and return to repeatedly, and each time, like in a kaleidoscope, discover a different layout of meanings. . . . This volume represents a solid contribution to STS and environmental humanities literature. . . . It will be a relevant and exciting read for scholars, students, and activists interested in more-than-human assemblages, power and resistance, as well as alternative ways of engaging with nonhuman actors in a shared landscape." - Anna Varfoolmeeva (Technoscienza)
