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CP455


Un/clean Science 
Convenor:
Jaco de Swart (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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Format:
Closed Panel
Location:
HG-07A33
Sessions:
Tuesday 16 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam

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 ask the audience to join us and share their own un/clean field work encounters.

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Tuesday 16 July, 2024, -