Short abstract:

This paper examines chemical imaginaries and practices in gyms in Medellin, Colombia. It considers international flows of chemical materials and discourses, and ways that "gym chemistry" entwine with local architectural practices essential to self-authorship and agency, as well as gender.

Long abstract:

Whilst not always concerned with “health”, biomedicine and pharmacology have long been central to the practices and cultures of “fitness”. Today, non-medical gym professionals and users increasingly understand “body projects” (Giddens 1991) in terms of chemicals (both endogamous and exogamous, legal and illegal, traditional and high-tech). In my fieldsites in Medellin, Colombia, my interlocutors inject testosterone and human growth hormone and drink potions of protein, creatine, and vitamins to enhance muscle mass; they consume caffeine and amino acids to stimulate increased workload; they talk of “endorphin highs'' and supplement this with the buzz of marijuana.

Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic research, this paper traces and discusses international flows of chemical materials and discourse. I argue dietary supplements and hormone therapies legitimize fitness as “scientific”, position the gym as a “lab”, and allow practitioners to embody the modernity, rationality, and productivity they associate positively with the Global North (and against decadent Latin-ness). I then move between material scales, examining how fitness entwines with local architectural practices of “autoconstruction” (building one’s own home). These are not just rhetorical metaphors; they reflect and prompt material practices. My interlocutors engage with protein and creatine as they do bricks and mortar, creating selves, bodies, and homes and enunciating agency. I will close with some remarks on the radical potential of the “gym chemist” as postmodern self-experimenter/hacker (/junkie, after Preciado (2008)), and find that fitness is gender affirming practice--whilst typically one used to emphasize genders assigned at birth.

Short abstract:

Can we think of the city as a chemical affair; as a passionate attachment and a public matter mediated by chemistry? Operating across affectivity, materiality, and sociality, the chemical affair brings to the fore Berlin as it is approached through and infrastructured by chemicals.

Long abstract:

Can we think of the city as a chemical affair – as a passionate attachment and a public matter mediated by chemistry? Attraction, repulsion, fusion, and dissolution might characterize this affair as it engenders transformative relations – from gradual corrosion and galvanizing refinements to spontaneous explosions. This paper is part of an ethnography on PrEP (Pre-Exposure-Prophylaxis), a drug to effectively prevent an HIV infection. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork within sexual cultures and the HIV prevention landscape of Berlin; the city that harbors the majority of (mostly gay male) PrEP users in Germany and that is emblematic of sexual permissiveness in the public imaginary. Through the lens of chemistry, I ask for the relationship between the pharmaceutical, its users, and the city. Operating across affectivity, materiality, and sociality, the chemical affair brings to the fore Berlin as it is approached through and infrastructured by chemicals. Chemistry serves as a metaphor to capture PrEP users’ relationship to the city, characterized by ambivalent feelings, by an ‘appalling appeal’. It also foregrounds the role of chemical agents, particularly antiretroviral drugs and illicit substances, to forge a sense of subcultural belonging and to experiment with bodily pleasures. I thus explore how the city variously inscribes itself into bodies through the chemical agent PrEP and how a specific notion of queer urbanity is constantly re-produced in chemically mediated body practices.

Short abstract:

The care turn of Pharmacy stresses the ambiguity of medication, a substance encompassing remedy and poison. Pharmaceuticals enable life and death, and the pharmacist’s plea to care can guide us to discuss their multiple effects.

Long abstract:

In the 1960s, a group of American pharmacists engaged in a dispute to participate in caring decisions to identify, resolve, and prevent problems caused by medication. Arguing that drug-related problems cost billions worldwide with hospitalization for bad reactions, misuse, drug interactions, and polypharmacy, they claim, as the profession of medication, the area would be the most qualified to intervene in this iatrogenic result of modern biomedicine. They advocate for care actions such as monitoring pharmacotherapy, managing prescriptions from different doctors, creating systems to control misuse, prescribing some medication, and educating society towards rational use. Known as “the care turn of pharmacy,” the movement spread worldwide in the 1990s and 2000, gaining considerable relevance in Europe and Latin America. Still, pharmacists are rarely actors of ethnographies, and we know little about how they manage care in their protocols, what the power struggles with doctors are, and how this area enacts drug care and creates infrastructure to control medication use. This paper delves into pharmaceutical bibliography, protocols, and documents to explore this intervention as the first stage of a long-term ethnographic project. Pharmacists’ movement to care stresses the ambiguity of medication, a substance encompassing remedy and poison. Pharmaceuticals enable life and death, and the pharmacist’s plea to care can guide us to discuss their multiple effects.

Short abstract:

Antibiotics and benzodiazepines are ubiquitous pharmaceutical substances. We follow their everyday effects, side- and “non”-effects in practices of (de)prescribing and (non)use, asking how they (re)enact moral worlds and chemo-socialities around normality, risky subjectivities, and good citizenship.

Long abstract:

Pharmaceuticals often remain uneasy solutions to a host of medical, political, and social ills, promising opportunities for relief while also portending novel, unforeseen risks. Substances like antibiotics for infection control or benzodiazepines for mental health care embody these fundamental ambivalences inherent in the increasing pharmaceuticalization of (public) health. Both ubiquitous substances in use and circulation, they act as “infrastructures” (Chandler 2019) of modern biomedicine, while antibiotic resistance and the risk of addiction, respectively, also underscore the deathly potential of their pharmaco-chemical worlds. As such, prescribers and users alike often conceive of antibiotics and benzodiazepines either as near-invisible pharmaceutical supplies or as overdetermined by their potential risks, fueling efforts of “de-prescribing.” Yet, pharmaceutical substances are never independent of the context in which they “intra-act” (Barad 2003): they are fluid (Hardon & Sanabria 2017), world-making (Nading 2020) actors and methods (Dumit 2021) to engage with the spaces and relations we often take for granted—and could be otherwise. What counts as substances’ effects and “side”-effects reveals how (un)livable and (in)hospitable worlds are created for some, not others. Based on ethnographic research in Austria, we engage with the situated meanings and effectiveness of antibiotics and benzodiazepines, asking how moral worlds and chemo-socialities—around ideas of normality, risky subjectivities, and good citizenship—are (re)made in practices of prescribing and using. Specifically, we consider their (speculative) “non”-effects in practices of de-prescribing and non-use, and how the refusing, rejecting, and opposing of substances enact different and often ambivalent chemo-socialities amid calls for “choosing wisely” and sustainability.

Short abstract:

The use of the insecticide chlordecone in French West Indies caused a long-standing soil and water pollution. This paper traces how biomonitoring, first used in epidemiological studies, became a public health instrument and confronts it to the Islands' history of colonial and chemical violence.

Long abstract:

The Martinique and Guadeloupe Islands are subjects of a long-standing soil and water pollution due to the residues of the insecticide chlordecone, an organochloride compound and persistent organic pollutant – continuously caused by other pesticides still largely in use. In 2013 and 2014, an epidemiological study conducted by the French public health agency Santé Publique France concluded that more than 90% of the 742 participants of the study living in both Islands had detectable chlordecone concentration in their blood (higher than 0,02 μg/L). In the following years, from being an epidemiological methodology, chlordecone biomonitoring became a public health instrument, as every person living in the French West Indies could access their level of chlordeconemy for free. This paper traces the elaboration of a public health policy based on the biomonitoring of the inhabitants and confronts it to the history of colonial and chemical violence due to massive pesticide use in Martinique and Guadeloupe. It sheds light on the environmental justice movement which claim to have free access to the biomonitoring of chlordecone and documents the tortuous regulatory science and policy process which turned exposure thresholds into public health recommendations. It concludes by showing how this damage-centered policy reinforces the individual frame of biosurveillance (in particular over bodies considered vulnerable such as pregnant women's, even if they were initially ignored by most of public health measures) by extracting them of local cultural practices and socio-ecological relationships.

Short abstract:

The Agrochemical Association Kenya (AAK), teaches farmers that pesticides exposure can be blocked, creating a sense of safety exploited to boost pesticide sales, but also invoked by farmers who aim to find middle ground between protection and exposure.

Long abstract:

A plethora of anxieties about growth, contamination, and risk crystalize around pesticide use. Pesticides draw awareness to the openness of bodies to their environment, and the simultaneous potential for growth and well-being and possibility of harm and disease that come from such body-environment exchanges. The material qualities of pesticides open up imaginations of bodies’ porosity that go beyond ingestion alone, as the body responds not only to food, but the environment at large. In this paper I reflect on a series of ‘responsible use of pesticides’ trainings, organized by Agrochemical Association Kenya (AAK), a lobby group representing the pesticide industry in Kenya, which I attended in 2019. In this training, the openness of bodies was reduced to three clearly delineated routes (touching, inhaling, ingesting, or skin, nose, mouth) that become passable in particular moments only (during spraying or eating). I argue that this notion remains an important facilitator of growth: macro-economically, to boost pesticide sales and the national production of maize, but also on a smaller scale, for individual farmers who aim to find middle ground between protection and exposure, openings and closures, in order to keep growing their food and families.

Short abstract:

Chlordecone is a chemical compound that was extensively utilized in Martinique’s banana plantations between 1973 and 1993. Considering its prolonged presence in the soil and its toxicity, this paper investigates the hauntological manifestations of this pesticide and explores their significance.

Long abstract:

Since 1973, chlordecone has been extensively used in the banana plantations of Martinique, a French overseas department in the Caribbean region, to eradicate banana borer weevils. Following its ban in 1993, numerous environmental studies have confirmed the pesticide’s long-term persistence in the island’s environment and have suggested that it could be responsible for many health and environmental problems. At a symbolic level, Martinican independence groups and critical French public figures have associated the use of the pesticide with colonialism, slavery, and land dispossession by European and French authorities. Seen as a tangible legacy of traumatic and violent histories, chlordecone has been more recently detected in soil analyses conducted by a regional Martinican agency focused on environmental protection. Furthermore, the pesticide has been identified through the “chlordéconémie”, a blood test designed to detect the pesticide in the human body. Using the theoretical framework of “hauntology” (Good, Chiovenda, and Rahimi 2022) and examining two ethnographic cases, this paper explores the multiple socio-cultural, political, and affective manifestations of this chemical compound in Martinican human and more-than-human worlds. The article’s ethnographic insights shed light on the complex relationship between the history of chlordecone and Martinican society, emphasizing practices of resistance to its toxicity amid tensions between the French central government and the island’s independence movements. Ultimately, the ethnographic evidence demonstrates how the presence and absence of this substance are intertwined with the rediscovery of alternative epistemologies and practices, envisioned as pathways to environmental justice and decolonial liberation.

Short abstract:

This paper examines how Finnish farmers relate to glyphosate, a widely used but also highly contested herbicide. By "making fields clean", glyphosate allows farmers to domesticate fields, while they also try to domesticate the herbicide itself by turning it into a controllable tool.

Long abstract:

Drawing on research conducted for my master’s thesis, this paper examines how Finnish farmers relate to glyphosate, a herbicide that is widely used in contemporary agriculture but also highly contested. Working with the concept of domestication, I suggest that glyphosate allows farmers to domesticate fields, maximise harvests, and cope in value chains where they have little power. When using glyphosate, farmers also try to domesticate the chemical itself by turning it into a controllable, knowable and ultimately unproblematic tool. Sometimes these efforts fail, as when glyphosate spills and spreads to unwanted places or fails to produce the clean fields that farmers are after. Despite these risks and limitations, farmers continue to rely on glyphosate to achieve successful domestication. Reworking Donna Haraway’s concept of companion species, I suggest that glyphosate has become a companion chemical, constitutively tied into who farmers are and what they do. In the course of continued glyphosate-based domestication, the skills, practices, and knowledges of farmers have changed as they have learned to live with glyphosate and use it to perform feats of successful domestication.

Short abstract:

This project looks at the haphazard shutting down of the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant to explore what is meant by decommissioning, by the state; how decommissioning is produced; and how these processes work together as an attempt to encapsulate toxicities and toxicants and standardize them.

Long abstract:

This project explores the decommissioning of nuclear power plants: specifically, the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), a permanently closed plant in Southern California, abutting the beach, surrounded by people surfing and sunning, and which, today, functions as an indefinite storage site for spent nuclear fuel. What efforts enact this lengthy process of decommissioning - of dismantling, decontaminating, shutting down? What is shutting down, when waste remains, when toxicities remain? And how do we live alongside San Onofre in the interim, and after? Drawing on literatures in discard studies and other studies of waste and purification, this project investigates decommissioning as a partial, nonlinear, incomplete, and provisional process, and it examines the way the site of SONGS is transformed by its current and prior uses. This project follows SONGS’s recurrent safety issues, its embattled initial and continuing shutdowns, the kittens that were born outside of Unit 1, even - in order to understand what is meant by decommissioning, by the state, and how it is produced - its environmental processes and temporalities, its bureaucratic and regulatory frustrations, and its remnants.

Short abstract:

Asking questions about the material-affective links between technoscientific and psychiatric lithium consumption via extraction, toxicity, and speculation, this paper explores points of akin-ship to understanding electric vehicles and human consumers of lithium in chemical relation.

Long abstract:

Like electric vehicles, some human bodies are ‘made better’ with lithium. Backed by the scientific belief that it is the optimal choice for the perpetual forward motion of these human and vehicular bodies, lithium consumption enables some futurities while foreclosing others.

This is an exploratory paper that outlines some early stages of thesis research, questioning under which conditions lithium is enabling, disabling, healing, toxic, conductive, destructive, or simply ambivalent. This paper focuses on some points of material-affective entanglement that link technoscientific and psychiatric lithium consumption, including extraction, toxicity, and speculation. In doing so it develops a notion of akin-ship as a way of thinking chemically mediated experiences of lithium consumption in relation to each other.