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Short abstract

Invisible airborne chemicals, from household to hazardous, stir public concern. Cross-country interviews reveal how perceptions at the molecular edge mix knowledge, emotion, and risk in shaping resilient futures.

Long abstract

This study examines public perceptions of chemicals and the associated risks taking the mental model approach focusing on both people’s cognitive (information and knowledge) and emotional dimensions. Our approach retains a strong contextual element in which the user’s mental model is driven primarily by user’s own understanding, concerns, and feelings. Regarding the chemicals investigated, the focus is on acetone, ammonia, chlorine, and toluene. These chemicals were selected as they may have some familiarity in modern industrial society because of their uses in consumer and regular household products, in agriculture, or traffic. Importantly, however, as volatile compounds in air, they are not visible, but they may have great impacts on human health and life if released as gas or when not handled with care. So far, there are only a few studies focusing on people’s understanding of inhalation as a route of exposure to chemical risks. This is surprising since poor air quality is currently one of the major global challenges posing severe environmental health threats.

The empirical data for this study is based on 11 focus group interviews with 36 participants and four semi-structured interviews with individual interviewees conducted in Finland, four focus group interviews conducted in Germany with 11 participants, and 23 individual interviews conducted in Greece. Our study discusses laypeople’s understandings, concerns, and feelings of common chemicals in everyday life and identifies challenges in laypeople’s understanding of chemical risks. Our study then contributes to the literature on risk perception by bringing laypeople’s perspectives on chemicals to the forefront.

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This presentation examines how biodesign, through molecular knowledge and biomatter itself, fosters responsible nature-culture relations, exploring interdisciplinary laboratory practices as tangible and regenerative applications beyond the lab, while asking where attentiveness would be needed.

Long abstract

Biodesign is an emerging design sub-discipline that integrates approaches from the life sciences, speculative design, and materials science, implementing organic materials and living organisms into design processes. It is perceived as a potential source of solutions for a sustainable future (Mason, Sharr 2022; Morrow, Bridgens, Mackenzie 2023; Gambardella 2024) and examined from multiple perspectives, addressing ethical questions (Armstrong 2022), presenting a developed taxonomy (Pollini, Rognoli 2024), and analyzing the role of workspaces and infrastructures in which it evolves (Ihls, Pollini 2025). Biodesigners mobilize phenomena stemming from the molecular properties of living organisms as constitutive elements of their projects: environmental modulation, biofilm formation, complex communicative forms, and metabolite biosynthesis are microbial capacities that predominantly attract interest. These capabilities serve as inspiration and as a medium, with the goal that outcomes – in the form of composites or biological substances – can be applied beyond laboratories/studios. This presentation examines how molecular knowledge and biomatter contribute to cultivating responsible nature-culture relations. The analysis is grounded in ethnographic research (observation, participant observation, and in-depth interviews) conducted during fieldwork in three “new laboratories” corresponding to the typology proposed: 1) a DIY laboratory, 2) an academic biodesign laboratory, and 3) a research and development institute. I interrogate how “bio” is mobilized in aspirations toward a “greener tomorrow” and the dimensions requiring attentiveness through the arts of noticing (Tsing 2015). I also reflect on biodesign through the lens of symbiopolitics (Helmreich 2009). The presentation contributes to the evolving discourse of biohumanities.

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Short abstract

Based on a sensory ethnography with a diabetes community developing a DIY automated insulin delivery system, this paper traces how sex steroid hormones are algorithmically scripted and re-coded as vital molecular signals that shape metabolic futures of people living with diabetes who menstruate.

Long abstract

In automated insulin delivery (AID) systems molecular life is continuously sensed and algorithmically predicted. Blood glucose levels are tracked in real time and translated into algorithmic adjustments of insulin dosing, producing predictive models that attempt to stabilize anticipated metabolic futures. However, sex steroid hormones secretions during menstrual cycle or menopause, modulate insulin sensitivity, reshaping metabolic responsiveness in ways that exceed standardized computational models.

Building on scholarship that reframes hormones as signaling cascades rather than messengers of sex (Ford et al., 2024), and developing Preciado’s notion of techno-biopolitical scripting (2013), I explore hormonal regulation in diabetes care as a molecular techno-bio-code: a script that materializes in tissues, devices, and data infrastructures, stabilizing particular endocrine norms. When algorithms fail to anticipate hormonal variability, deviations are not merely transient errors; recurrent hypo- or hyperglycemic episodes can sediment into metabolic memory, producing cumulative risk that shapes the long-term metabolic futures of people living with diabetes who menstruate. Toxicity thus emerges not only from excess or deficiency of a substance, but from misalignment between distinct molecular cocktails and the standardized codes designed to govern them.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with users and developers of DIY AID systems, I show how such scripts can be re-coded. Through hormonal mind mapping, a collaborative sensory drawing practice, research partners trace how hormonal rhythms intra-act with algorithms, identifying which fluctuations can be encoded and which remain technically untranslatable. Hormones thus appear simultaneously as a source of metabolic risk and as a vital signal through which users recalibrate algorithmic care.

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Short abstract

TNT dumped in postwar oceans does not disappear – it transforms. Corroding munitions leak toxic metabolites into the sea, absorbed by marine life decades later. This contribution traces TNT's slow violence across seawater, exhibition spaces, and an STS researcher's encounter with a toxic molecule.

Long abstract

Trinitrotoluene (2,4,6-trinitrotoluene, TNT) is a chemical compound best known as an explosive. Since its synthesis by German chemist Julius Willbrand in 1863, it has become the world's most widely used conventional explosive – its energy yield serving as the standard measure for all explosions. TNT has a violent effect in two different temporalities. Its rapid violence is well understood: a detonator triggers near-instantaneous release of enormous energy. Less visible, but equally consequential, is its "slow violence" (Rob Nixon). After the First and Second World Wars, thousands of tonnes of ammunition – most of it containing TNT – were dumped into the oceans, then considered a safe disposal site. Decades later, corroding casings are leaking. TNT does not simply degrade; it transforms into metabolites such as 2-ADNT and 4-ADNT, molecules that are no less toxic than the original substance, now absorbed by marine life across the seas.

Drawing on two transnational and transdisciplinary EU research projects investigating ammunition pollution in the North Sea, this paper traces how TNT spreads through seawater, how the topic was communicated through a travelling exhibition – and how an anthropologist and STS researcher came to encounter, through a single molecule, the slow violence and the toxic legacies that outlasts war itself.

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Analyzing Mitra, Ne rien laisser passer (2025) on glyphosate, we show how sequential art renders molecular agency, controversy, and non-human entanglements visible. We propose comics as a heuristic space to imagine resilient, toxic-vital futures.

Long abstract

Contribution Type: Experimental/Methodological Contribution

STS has long recognized that linear narratives fail to capture the heterogeneity of sociotechnical worlds. Aligning with the conference theme More than now, this proposal asks: What if STS inquiry itself was conducted through comics? We argue that comics constitute a genuine methodological operation, not just a popularization medium.

Focusing on a controversial substance, the glyphosate, we analyze the graphic novel Mitra, Ne rien laisser passer (2025), which investigates the controversies in which it is engaged. We demonstrate how the medium’s specific properties—sequentiality, graphic density, and narrative juxtaposition—make molecular substances legible as both toxic and vital actors. Unlike traditional text, comics visualize the relational geometry of collectives, the materiality of practices, and the emotional intensities surrounding chemical safety and its regulation.

By tracing the co-production of writing, drawing, and staging, this paper shows how comics reveal divergent viewpoints and heterogeneous assemblages often marginalized in academic writing. This approach fosters abductive reasoning and reflexivity regarding positionality, crucial for navigating crises and imagining resilient futures. We contend that comics expand the boundaries of scholarly evidence, offering a unique space where knowledge about molecular life is produced, taught, and legitimized. Ultimately, we propose comics as an essential tool for STS to engage with non-humans and co-create futures where the entanglement of toxicity and vitality is critically understood and responsibly managed.

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Short abstract

A photographic project “Exposed Acid” visualizes the invisible chemical agents that shape contemporary toxic environments, specifically sulfuric acid permeating waters as a result of mining operations. The project contributes to posthumanist discussions of late industrial toxic ecologies.

Long abstract

This paper presents a photographic project called “Exposed Acid” and examines how photographic practice can render visible the invisible chemical agents that shape contemporary toxic environments. It does so by focusing on sulfuric acid contamination resulting from mining operations. Mining activities that expose sulfide minerals generate sulfuric acid, which dissolves heavy metals and produces long lasting contamination in soils and waterways.

The photographic project was conducted at a former copper mining site in Outokumpu, Finland, an area known for severe ecological degradation caused by decades of mining activity. In particular, local water bodies have become highly acidic due to the dumping of mining waste.

To expose the agency of sulfuric acid itself, I carried out a photographic experiment using analog film. During fieldwork, I collected water from a contaminated lake (measured at pH 2) and later soaked unprocessed film in this acidic water before developing it using C 41 chemistry. By disrupting the material processes of film development, the acid co authored the images, leaving visible traces of its destructive interactions with the film surface. Through this method, the photographs become more than representations of degraded landscapes; they serve as material records of chemical encounters, revealing the presence and agency of toxic matter.

Artistically, the project examines the material presence of a toxic chemical agent and contributes to posthumanist discussions of chemical modernity and late industrial toxic ecologies. It further enriches debates on posthuman and nonhuman photography by foregrounding chemical forces as active participants in image making.

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Short abstract

Antibiotics are leaky substances that heal by harming, blurring toxicity and vitality. Ethnographic research in India shows how antimicrobial resistance (AMR) emerges through everyday practices where antibiotics circulate as mundane objects, producing what I call unruly connectedness.

Long abstract

Antibiotics are paradigmatic substances of contemporary technoscience: they heal and harm at the same time – or rather: they heal by harming, shifting constantly between toxicity and vitality. As leaky substances, their effects extend beyond the bodies they treat and their afterlives continue to affect microbial ecologies, inextricably linking them with the emergence and governance of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

While Global Health frameworks describe AMR as a coherent planetary (present and future) threat, ethnographic encounters reveal a fragmented reality. Here, antibiotics present themselves as quick fixes for everyday problems, commodities, unlabelled liquids, or chemical traces in feed and environments; AMR may present itself in lab results, a cough that does not resolve, a dead body, or usually as nothing observable at all. Not because AMR is absent in such settings, but because the epistemic and infrastructural practices required to render it legible are unevenly distributed.

Based on fieldwork across different contexts in India, I trace how antibiotics circulate through local ecologies. In these layers of everyday life, resistance is produced and experienced, yet AMR itself often remains a spectral presence that is invisible, actively concealed, or fragmented into disconnected material traces. From this perspective, AMR is not an outcome of clearly identifiable actions, but emerges from a situated convergence of practices.

I conceptualise this condition as Unruly Connectedness: AMR is materially entangled with antibiotics, while the contextual understandings of both remain partially decoupled from that entanglement. This concept highlights how molecular life is rendered (un-)governable by selectively stabilising certain relations.

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Short abstract

By drawing on two ethnographic studies at fertility clinics in Finland and US, this academic paper asks how IVF laboratory environments - material, chemical and contextual – are proliferated in embryo culture, and how environmental complexity and multiplicity reflect multiple bio-economies.

Long abstract

The In vitro fertilization laboratory, like all laboratories, is a carefully controlled environment, aiming to mimic the optimal reproductive environment. During embryo culture, embryos in the laboratories are cocooned inside layered artificial environments, like a Russian doll, re/produced by culture media, incubator and air filter technologies. Prior research shows that just like any physical environment, laboratory environments themselves can affect embryonic development and cause embryo toxicity. Laboratories have come to increasingly be understood as containing environmental factors which might (epigenetically) influence the health of present and future babies and generations. This paper is concerned with how environments - material, chemical and contextual – are proliferated at the clinics. Drawing on two ethnographic studies at seven fertility clinics in a Nordic Welfare state of Finland and US during 2014-2026, we show how this environmental complexity is enacted at the clinics by multitude of actors, including the transnational fertility bioindustry responding to the perception of environmental complexity by producing different kinds of new technologies and pharmaceuticals to market. We argue that the clinical-technical practices produce environments that in many ways hinder possibility for human life despite the hype around some of these technologies in the fertility sector. In such cases, concerns are raised over the best interests of patients, embryos and future babies, and who is liable. We conclude that embryo culture is not just a site for multiple and complex environments but also a site of multiple bio-economies of assisted reproduction, reflecting the differences in the market economies of both countries.

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Short abstract

Hormones sustain life through physiological-ecological networks equally open to endocrine-disrupting chemicals. This work develops hormonal infrastructure to reframe vital/toxic ambiguity across scales that dominant safety assessments systematically fail to reach.

Long abstract

Sperm counts and biodiversity are vitality indicators that chemical safety assessments struggle to read. Epistemic regimes focused on singularized substances with demonstrable risk fail to account for toxicities that unfold through cumulative, low-dose, and mixture exposures. I identify this mismatch as molecular myopia: not an absence of risk awareness, but an inability to connect emerging risk knowledge across scales through which chemical harm creeps.

To reframe what molecular myopia obscures, this paper develops the concept of hormonal infrastructure – the sensitive physiological-ecological networks that underlie reproduction, development, and metabolism across interconnected bodies, species, and environments. These infrastructures deliver vital hormonal services via molecular pathways that are equally open to exogenous disruptors such as EDCs. The boundary between vitality and toxicity appears only with increasing scales of biological organization, instrumentation, and time.

Using urban wastewater treatment as an empirical context, I trace how hormonal infrastructure is materially shaped through everyday chemical use, technoscientific practice, and natural processes. My aim is to rethink man-made chemicals as part of more-than-human infrastructures that reconfigure through wastewater systems – e.g. once vital pharmaceuticals turning toxic – thus exceeding the logic of laboratory-defined safety. In the face of proliferating chemical production, this paper reorients vigilance from molecules-to-body towards volumes-to-ecosystem to open conceptual space for more resilient futures.

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This contribution explores the spatial conditions which shape the ways in which distinctions between the vitalities and toxicities of PFAS substances are contested in remediation efforts.

Long abstract

Where are the lines between the toxicity and vitality of substances drawn, contested, and negotiated? Where and how do substances transform from being ‘essential’ and ‘vital’ chemicals to contemporary social, political, and economic life to being ‘toxic’ contaminants which disrupt bodies, environments, and daily lives? Drawing from my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork around PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) remediation efforts in the south of the Netherlands, I explore the various sites—such as, court rooms, local vegetable gardens, and chemical plants—where scientists, local residents, politicians, corporate actors, and environmental consultants contest the lines between the vitality and toxicity of PFAS substances.

Through ethnographic vignettes, this contribution details how vitalities and toxicities of PFAS are constructed and confronted differently across various spaces; in doing so, I explore the spatial aspects of not just establishing and evidencing toxicity but also maintaining the distinctions between substances which are vital and those which are toxic. By focusing specifically on the social, political, and environmental entanglements of the PFAS remediation efforts in the south of the Netherlands, this contribution traces how the contingent and spatial conditions of remediation efforts inform notions of chemical transgression, disruption, and normalcy.

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Short abstract

The paper presents an interdisciplinary project situated at the intersection of art and microbiology, which explores possibilities of fungal decomposition of a plastic corset, tracing the links between plastic’s longevity, BDSM aesthetics, and real-time microbial evolution.

Long abstract

"Composting Horror Barbie" is an interdisciplinary research project situated between anthropology, bio-art and microbiology, that investigates the metabolic afterlives of synthetic materials through artistic speculation and microbiological experimentation. Originating as a collage produced at the Matter of Flux festival (Art Laboratory Berlin, 2023), it follows the transformation of a polyurethane and PVC corset once associated with the social media profile of a fictional and ephemeral entity called “Horror Barbie.” The project explores strategies for training selected fungi strains to decompose the corset.

"Composting Horror Barbie" foregrounds the collision of multiple metabolic time-scales: the deep time of petroleum-derived plastics, the transient lifespans of digital identities, and the accelerating rhythms of microbial evolution. It explores the interrelations between the evolutionary history of fungi and the deep history of petroleum, tracing its origin to the ancient forests that could not be decomposed because fungi had not yet developed the ability to break down lignin, as well as the entanglements of the slow violence of plastic pollution with the eroticization of violence in the context of BDSM practices, and the dual meanings of plasticity—as both the malleability of inorganic matter and the vulnerability of living bodies to physical and symbolic violence.

By mobilizing these temporal, metabolic, and affective entanglements the project frames biodegradation as an epistemic practice: a site of cross-species negotiation where synthetic, biological, and fictional agencies co-compose new narratives of transformation and new practices of care and remediation.