Log in to star items.
- Convenors:
-
Janine Hauer
(Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg)
Stefan Böschen (Käte Hamburger Kolleg Cultures of Research, RWTH Aachen University)
Joerg Niewoehner (Technical University of Munich)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
The panel seeks to take effects & pre-conditions of chemo-industrial processes as starting points to illuminate on how different actors within the sector address current challenges. This is based on empirical research in & with chemistry, material sciences & related professions and institutions.
Description
The impacts of roughly 120 years of chemo-industrial production on bodies and ecosystems at various scales are increasingly being realized, mapped and critiqued. Studies focusing on the (harmful) effects of mass-synthesis and molecular-planetary alterations of bodies and ecosystems have contributed valuable sources for localized resistance and have fostered attention to questions of uneven distribution, regulation, protection and compensation, as well as long-term systemic effects of chemo-molecular interventions into the earth system. Recognizing the value of these works this panel seeks to take the various effects as well as the structural preconditions of chemo-industrial processes as a starting point to illuminate on how different actors within the chemo-industrial sector adress contemporary challenges. We are therefore inviting contribution that speak to the following questions:
o How, where and when are what practices and technologies of synthesizing and modifying the material foundations of living being re-thought and re-made and (how) does this address their various and potentially harmful consequences?
o How, where and when are residues and remnants of chemo-industrial processes being dealt with?
o What are the specific conditions and considerations that en- or disable and regulate certain technologies and practices?
Moreover we are interested in the specific modes and relations of doing research in and with the chemo-industrial field:
o What and how do STS contribute to current shifts and transformations in the chemo-industrial sector?
o What chances and challenges have you encountered in specific research contexts and how have you come to address them with what effects?
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
Our contribution examines how pollution in Bitterfeld-Wolfen is sensed, made, and negotiated through entwined technical practices and everyday encounters. As a late-industrial palimpsest, the region reveals how contaminants haunt communities and shape practices of care, memory, and future-making.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on medium-term ethnographic fieldwork in Bitterfeld-Wolfen, we examine how pollution is sensed, lived with, and temporally negotiated in a late-industrial, postsocialist town shaped by dense historical overlappings. As a paradigmatic Just Transition area, Bitterfeld-Wolfen embodies a palimpsest of historical lignite mining and chemical production, socio-cultural ruptures of the reunification, contemporary pressures of remediation and processes of structural change towards sustainable chemistry. These layers do not simply coexist: they entangle in everyday socio-spatial and embodied practices within local communities underlain by one of the world's largest groundwater contaminations.
By combining human geography with media studies and STS, we understand underground pollution as a situated object of knowledge on the surface through the interaction of technical remediation practices and residents’ affective, sensory engagements with their environment. Groundwater contamination is not merely measured; it is made — as a technoscientific object produced through sensors and maps; instrumented through pumps and underground protection walls; encountered as an everyday phenomenon through smells, gas in cellars, obtrusive infrastructures, or stories and specters of past contamination. While scientific representations mirror the heterogeneous distribution of chemicals underground, residents above experience them as ghostly afterlives of socialist industrialism haunting the neighbourhood.
We conceptualise Bitterfeld-Wolfen’s groundwater contamination as a sensor media milieu in which sciences, infrastructure, and the socio-spatial entwine. This perspective highlights how polluted environments act as archives of socio-ecological history and how sustainable futures may emerge when pollution is approached not only as a perpetual threat but as an iterative practice of remediation, negotiation, and community endurance.
Paper short abstract
While mechanical and chemical recycling could support the transformation towards sustainable chemistry, there’s significant controversy whether they would complement or compete with each other. A 2025 survey of international stakeholders provides insights to this question.
Paper long abstract
The chemical sector produces a diversity of intermediates and products which underpin the normal functioning of our society. It thus plays a key role in our society’s sustainability transformation. As chemical production is dependent on carbon resources, the route towards sustainable chemistry entails not only the transformation from (1) fossil to renewables (i.e., electricity requirements but also as resource basis) and from (2) linear to circular carbon economy (i.e., recirculation of carbon-containing waste streams back into the production cycle), but also from (3) a dependence on imported to utilization of domestic carbon resources to increase the sector’s resilience.
Increasingly, recycling – comprising mechanical and chemical recycling – is being highlighted as playing a key role in enabling the achievement of the three building blocks highlighted above for the industry’s sustainability transformation. However, there remains significant controversy regarding whether mechanical and chemical recycling have the potential to complement each other in a recycling cascade, or whether there’s a risk of competition for waste feedstocks which could lead to crowding-out of mechanical by chemical recycling developments.
In our presentation, we explore the potential of mechanical and chemical recycling as transformation routes for the chemical sector in the global context. Additionally, we will present results from a 2025 survey carried out with international stakeholders from industry and science in the recycling and chemical industries to share insights on their perspectives on challenges and opportunities which are associated with the development/deployment of mechanical and chemical recycling to support the transformation towards sustainable chemistry.
Paper short abstract
Chemical products are comprised of many different substances, resulting in chemical complexity, and epistemic and regulatory challenges. I use the concept of chemical space to map molecular infrastructures of polyolefins and MOFs and discuss the choices inherent in current material design.
Paper long abstract
In creating chemical products with specific functionalities, multitudes of substances are combined into materials of enormous internal complexity and diversity. For example, in the 9 most common types of plastics, a recent study identified more than 16,000 individual substances [Monclus et al. 2025]. The resulting complexity of products not only leads to possible emerging system dynamics not foreseeable by its constitutive elements, but also increases the number of different anthropogenic substances circulating through markets, environments, and bodies.
Currently, more than 350,000 individual anthropogenic chemicals are estimated to be circulating global markets [Wang et al. 2020], overwhelming regulatory bodies and (eco-)toxicological testing capacities. Some scholars therefore demand chemical simplification, reducing the number of novel anthropogenic substances, and reducing chemical complexity. This requires a deeper understanding of the current molecular systems in chemical products.
One way to make sense and bring order to the vast number of chemical substances is the concept of chemical space – arranging chemicals by their structural similarity and thereby translating these structures into machine readable information. I am mapping this chemical space with computational tools to understand molecular diversity in polyolefin products and metal-organic frameworks, comparing a more traditional field of chemistry with a rapidly developing novel area of material development. This mapping is followed by expert interviews to amend the purely molecular dimension by adding insights into social and economic dimensions, ultimately allowing insights into how and why these complex chemical systems come to be, and what alternative pathways for material design might be.
Paper short abstract
The plastics industry is a part of the chemical industry sector that faces challenges related to accumulation and pollution. This article presents preliminary findings of an investigation into the controversies surrounding the future of this industry in the context of the imperative to decarbonize.
Paper long abstract
This paper will outline the research perspective and some preliminary results of a study of controversies on the decarbonization of the plastics industry. This research is conducted in the frame of SPECULAR, a French interdisciplinary project involving field enquiries and participatory research conducted with industrial stakeholders. The plastics industry is an important part of the chemo-industrial sector, whose contemporary challenges have been largely documented in STS and more general social science literature. The development of plastics is one of the innovations that has the most affected the conditions of everyday life and industrial production since the second world war, deeply shaping the materiality of the innumerable objects that make up modernity. Yet the plastics industry faces a series of strong issues. Plastics release carbon compounds into the atmosphere through their production, but also into soils and marine environments through the waste they generate. Plastic production is huge and is expected to continue, with an OECD prediction of a three-fold increase over the next 20 years. The extent and nature of the problems related to plastic accumulation, as well as the possible solutions (such as optimizing processes, recycling, reducing use through sufficiency practices, developing bio-sourced alternative to petro-sources plastics, etc) are the object of controversies involving various stakeholders: manufacturers and industry actors, public laboratories, NGOs and activists, public policy actors, etc. One of the aims of the project is to examine how these controversies evolve and develop with the imperative of decarbonization promoted in contemporary public policy programs.
Paper short abstract
In Bhopal, residues and remnants of chemo-industrial processes interact with structural failures to form a toxic waterscape. Using ethnography and STS, this study explores how residents leverage their everyday infrastructural literacy to actively contest institutional denial to access safe water.
Paper long abstract
The world often views Bhopal as an event temporally rooted in the 1984 gas leak. However, present-day Bhopal is better understood as the culmination of residues and remnants of chemo-industrial processes that began with the establishment of the Union Carbide factory. Structural factors ensured that the lives of residents living adjacent to the factory became entangled with these processes in multiple ways, including through materialities of the factory’s everyday functioning. Routine disposal of waste adjacent to nearby residential settlements meant that residents became an integral part of this toxic landscape. Today, abandoned hazardous waste leaching into groundwater forms a toxic waterscape, where nature is continuously produced through societal, political and ecological conditions. Bhopal’s waterscape operates as a site where structural and institutional failures and enduring toxicity of the environment are absorbed directly into daily routines of survival and quest to access safe water.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across institutional and everyday spaces, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) frameworks, this paper examines the material realities of surviving environmental toxicity. In navigating this precarity, households constantly acquire situated knowledge, mapping the socio-spatial inequalities of the public water distribution network. By forming fluid grassroots collectives, residents leverage their everyday infrastructural literacy to actively contest institutional denial.
Additionally, this paper demonstrates how climate variability interacts with structural failures to constrain access to safe water and amplify contamination pathways. These environmental shifts further intensify gendered labour burdens, as women bear a disproportionate responsibility to manage water portfolios from increasingly constrained resource pools.
Paper short abstract
Reactive nitrogen is paradigmatic for the anthropocene: more than half of the world's food supply relies on it, but it is also turning inland and coastal waters into death zones. Based on an ethnography of nitrogen, I argue that as long as its flow can be maintained, however, this is not a problem.
Paper long abstract
Reactive nitrogen is one of the great achievements of industrial modernity. The ability to produce food from thin air has massively altered our ability to produce food independent of soil fertility. Over half of the world's (and rising) nutrition is sustained by industrially-produced nitrogen compounds. This plenty of fertility however causes problems elsewhere: excess nitrogen seeps into rivers, groundwater, lakes and coastal ecosystems, disturbing their chemical and biological milieus and causing so-called death zones where only algae can thrive. Yet given its essential role in feeding the world we cannot stop to produce and release ever more reactive nitrogen, even if the planetary boundary of this chemical has long been exceeded: the flow must go on.
In more than one way, I want to argue here, anthropogenic nitrogen is a good model for dealing with chemicals and the ecological problems they cause. Although the problem seems unsolveable on a global scale, a multitude of solutions have successfully mediated it locally, mostly through economic tools and strategies. Unlike many other chemicals, it is thus no longer a matter of broad public concern but can be considered well-managed even if we were unable to remove it from our social metabolism. Based on my ethnography of nitrogen in Germany, this talk outlines the logic underlying its management and circulation between fertiliser plants, farms, waterworks, kitchens, wastewater treatment and the Baltic Sea: as long as its flow goes on, we can be oblivious of nitrogen.
Paper short abstract
This paper argues that sensory experience and participatory ethnographic methods generate environmental knowledge beyond enumerative science, making the lived effects of chemo-industrial residues and chronic toxicity perceptible even when causal links between pollution and illness remain uncertain.
Paper long abstract
Aliaga is a petrochemical town in Türkiye where residents live under the cumulative toxic burden of three oil refineries and a dense cluster of petrochemical industries. Although the long-term impacts of chemo-industrial production on bodies and ecosystems are increasingly documented, causal links between pollution and chronic illness remain difficult to establish. Scientific uncertainty stems from layered chemical exposures, atmospheric drift, and long temporal delays between exposure and disease, while political constraints include inconsistent environmental monitoring and pressure on public health research and environmental activism. As a result, the health effects of chemo-industrial residues in the region remain unevenly documented and contested.
Drawing on ethnographic research with families in Aliaga, particularly mothers caring for children with asthma, bronchitis, and allergies, this paper examines how residents apprehend and respond to chronic toxicity in the absence of stable scientific evidence. Families track smells, dust, breathing difficulties, and fluctuations in industrial emissions, while adjusting everyday practices of care such as cleaning routines, food sourcing, and strategies for avoiding polluted air.
Building on concepts such as popular epidemiology (Brown 1992) and subaltern science (Van Hollen 2022), the paper explores how sensory experience and everyday observation become forms of environmental knowledge. It further reflects on participatory ethnographic approaches, including sensory ethnography and participatory mapping, as ways to study the residues and lived effects of chemo-industrial processes where their harms remain scientifically indeterminate yet experientially present.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how aroma generation platforms translate smell and taste into molecular correlations that travel across local and global regulations, and analyzes the emerging chemical–aesthetic–legal complex that stabilizes these percepts, outlining how this can be studied ethnographically.
Paper long abstract
Recent developments in the aroma industry center on AI-based platforms that promise to reinvent known smells and tastes through ingredients that comply with expanding health and environmental regulations. Instead of treating smell and taste as relational and embodied emergences, these systems render aromas as standardized percepts that can be recomposed across changing regulatory contexts and ingredient restrictions.
Drawing on the case of an olfactory and gustatory AI developed by the US-based company Osmo, I identify and analyze three main dimensions in the new AI-driven aroma industry. First, smell and taste are treated as stable objects and rendered objective within these platforms, making them recomposable across local regulations and restrictions. Second, such systems depend on extensive sensory labor and classificatory work to develop aroma taxonomies and evaluation protocols that translate lived sensory encounters into standardized data. Third, these taxonomies and protocols are used to map correlations between sensory descriptions and molecular structure, inscribing percepts into new technical and regulatory domains. Through these developments, I reveal a set of chemo-sensory infrastructures and practices in an emerging chemical-aesthetic-legal complex, in which molecules and regulatory constraints reorganize each other.
Lastly, I outline ethnographic possibilities for studying and intervening in the infrastructures and practices of this chemical-aesthetic-legal complex, showing how attention to their capacity to produce new materialities can accompany efforts to destabilize the invention of stable percepts.
Paper short abstract
This article analyses how residual governance makes toxic harm governable through uncertainty, delay, and containment. It argues that the Swedish Kallinge ruling unsettles this logic by recognising PFAS in blood as injury, making persistent presence itself actionable harm.
Paper long abstract
This article examines how the Swedish state has become both a polluter and a regulator of PFAS, a group of highly persistent chemicals widely used in modern chemo-industrial production. Focusing on three contamination cases linked to military sites where firefighting foam polluted soil, groundwater, aquatic life, and human bodies, the article explores how PFAS contamination is rendered knowable, governable, and compensable across legal and scientific settings. It identifies the Swedish Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in the Kallinge case, which recognised the presence of PFAS in human blood as a compensable injury, as a biolegal turning point in residual governance. The ruling shifts the evidentiary ground of environmental responsibility: harm is no longer tied only to visible illness, but also to the enduring presence of toxic substances in the body. By recognising presence itself as injury, the judgment unsettles a mode of governance based on containment, delay, and deferred accountability. In doing so, it shows how courts can become sites for contesting the temporal and embodied consequences of chemo-industrial residues.