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- Convenor:
-
Jaco de Swart
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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- Format:
- Closed Panel
Short Abstract:
This is a panel about cleanliness. It investigates how modern scientific practices contribute to, or interfere with, different versions of cleaning and cleanliness—hygienic, environmental, aesthetic, or otherwise—through the impact of their waste, workings, or knowledge products.
Long Abstract:
Modern science is built on dreams of purity. But if conceptual order and messiness have received a lot of interest in social studies of science, material cleaning and dirtying remained in the background. In this panel, we turn the tables and wonder about the material cleans and dirts in—and of—science. We investigate how modern scientific practices contribute to, or interfere with, different versions of cleanliness—hygienic, environmental, aesthetic, or otherwise. What values of clean do scientists create or adhere to? What wastes and dirt do they introduce and leave behind? And how does their work create tensions between different registers of clean and dirt?
The panelists trace how knowledge ideals in the physical and life sciences build on ideas of cleanliness, depend on material cleaning work, or introduce lasting new senses of dirt. In the laboratories of fundamental physics, we follow the dependencies of quantum technologies on optical measures of cleanliness and trace the ‘goods’ of cleaning a detector that searches for hypothetical dark matter particles. On land and in the sea, we track the polluting tensions of chemical interventions with the introduction of new insecticides and illustrate struggles for cleanliness as seaweeds inundate white sand beaches. We will ask the audience to join us and share anecdotes about the cleans and dirts they have encountered in their own field work.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Laura Otto (Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg) Ramona Haegele (Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg)
Long abstract:
When people think of algae, images of pond scum, dirt, or slime usually come to mind. However, without algae, life on Earth would cease to exist. Algae play a crucial role in maintaining the freshness and cleanliness of bodies of water, as they absorb pollutants in the ocean and store carbon dioxide. Despite often being perceived as a “dirty” aquatic species, algae are yet key companions in the Anthropocene era. In the Caribbean, where Sargassum has begun washing up on shore in massive quantities in 2011, algae is often placed on the dirty–clean continuum, generating ontological struggles, as the algae alternates between being perceived as a natural component of marine biodiversity and a troublesome nuisance causing economic and environmental disruptions. The positioning of Sargassum along this spectrum significantly shapes practices of its management. We discuss the multifaceted material politics surrounding the management of Sargassum along the Caribbean coast of Mexico. Drawing on ethnographic research, we explore how various actors navigate the complexities of handling and disposing of Sargassum, shedding light on the intricate sociomaterial assemblages involved in its management. Furthermore, we scrutinize the material transformations undergone by Sargassum, from collection and processing to potential repurposing as fertilizer or biomass, elucidating the contested narratives surrounding its value and utility.
Cameron Brinitzer (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
Long abstract:
Pests are the picture of uncleanliness, infestation an exuberant case. Cockroaches, bedbugs, mosquitos, fleas, flies, lice. Whether such creatures are in our homes, on our crops, or mingling with our bodies, they figure as beings out of place—embodiments of uncleanliness. Twentieth-century synthetic chemistry provided humans with astonishing powers to eliminate critters designated pests. And yet, in the very act of chemically cleaning environments, synthetic chemistry created novel forms of uncleanliness. DDT is exemplary. Considered something of a miracle in the 1940s, its incredible capacity to decimate diseased and unclean beings was celebrated with no less than a Nobel Prize. But by the 1970s, former boosters such as the American government were banning the chemical in light of widespread concerns about its hazardous effects on environments and life forms. Since pests persist, a cleaner cleaning agent was needed and synthetic chemistry was quick to deliver. A new class of insecticides—pyrethroids—was developed in the 1970s to supplant organochlorines such as DDT. Pyrethroids were and remain defined by regulatory agencies as minimally toxic to mammals—clean enough—and they have been prolifically applied across indoor and agricultural environments around the world ever since. As a result, the planet is now saturated with pyrethroids. And, a growing body of evidence suggests their toxicities may be more than minimal. In this paper, I explore what novel anthropogenic biologies that are consequent to chemical technologies—for example, pyrethroid resistant bedbugs—illuminate about the limits of thinking and regulating isolated chemicals as clean or unclean.
Alvaro Alarcón (Linköping University) Camilo Castillo (University of Gothenburg)
Short abstract:
Through an ethnography of a quantum technologies laboratory, we investigate how experimental cleaning practices can work as a tool to identify tensions at play in quantum mechanics, such as “theory” and “practice,” “classical” and the “ quantum” and, ultimately, between “nature” and the “human”.
Long abstract:
Quantum technologies promise experiments that explain the "real" manifestations of nature. To achieve this, it is essential for experimenters to both transform and measure quantum objects, so those measurements are meaningful representations of physical processes. In a quantum technologies lab in Sweden, “optical losses” are a common measurement for scientists to anticipate how “good” an experiment can be. However, as we realized during our ethnography, in the face of promising results, experimenters sometimes underestimate that a “good” experiment is perhaps not that clean. One serious consequence of this, is that experiments can risk not being considered as quantum. But when one scientist’s hunch raised the need to measure the “optical losses” and clean the experiment, those promising results began to shake.
Here we argue that cleaning the experiment was not a whimsical decision, but a fundamental activity in experiments. As we show, they are necessary for scientific results and also for interfering with taken for granted representations of experimental practices in the sciences. By analyzing how an optical fiber connector is cleaned and how data is cleaned through post processing, we show that beyond reducing losses in quantum measurements, cleaning can work as a tool to situate deep tensions at play in quantum mechanics such as “theory” and “practice”, the “classical” and the “quantum” and ultimately between “nature” and the “human”. We expect to contribute to opening research questions regarding cleaning in the sciences relevant for interdisciplinary work between the so-called natural and social sciences.
Jaco de Swart (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Long abstract:
Laboratory sciences crucially depend on experiments being clean. But what is clean? This talk contributes to the study of valuing in the sciences by opening up the good of ‘clean’ in a physics experiment. My case is the XENONnT experiment in the Gran Sasso Mountains of Italy which is meant to detect dark matter in the form of the hypothetical WIMP – the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle. This experiment is clean when it is ‘free from signals that mimic dark matter’. In practice, such cleanliness has been difficult to achieve – soaps may be radioactive, steel may spread electronegativity, and humans are altogether dangerously filthy. And because, at least thus far, dark matter remains elusive, it is impossible to tell whether the meticulously cleaned detector is adequately clean. Additional cleaning efforts will make the detector sensitive to neutrino particles: a background that cannot be cleaned away. As the experimenters dread the possibility that this means their experiment will end in limbo, other physicists are now trying to detect other hypothetical dark matter particles with other kinds of experiments, requiring other kinds of cleanliness. Meanwhile, the attempts to achieve detector specific cleanliness requires resources and generates discards that all too easily go unnoticed. In response to this, I contend that such externalities, that is the ‘external bads’ generated by experimental sciences, urgently deserve attention.