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Paper short abstract

We introduce a relational account of substances as a complementary perspective to the study of materiality in late industrialism. Drawing on arsenic compounds and substances in sustainable construction as examples, we reflect on the analytical implications and methodological choices this entails.

Paper long abstract

In STS, materiality is very often treated either in the form of shaped objects or as vital elements capable of agency. In addition, perspectives from multi-species ethnographies or feminist approaches in STS emphasise hybridity between living and non-living matter. It seems as if materiality has been sufficiently conceptualised and researched. In this presentation, we suggest an ‘add-on’ to these conceptualisations by focusing on the material residues of chemical research and design in late industrialism.

The industrial-scale production and global circulation of (consumer) goods, raw materials, and waste has produced an almost unmanageable number of chemical substances existing in the world. No data is available on the effects of many of these substances, and their sheer amount creates complex system dynamics that cannot (any longer) be fully grasped by knowledge practices.

Scientific and regulatory practices that take substances as stable, isolated entities, are an inherent part of creating these complex dynamics that shape human biology and ecosystems deeply and irreversibly. Therefore, developing processual, relational accounts of substances seems both consequential, and a way to generate much needed change towards more sustainable and responsible futures.

Based on our own research projects on chemical villains (arsenic compounds) and potential heroes (substances in sustainable construction practices), we propose to take substantial transformations as vantage point for ethnographic research for such an endeavour, and spell out the methodological and analytical implications such a turn to the molecular level and these transformations entails.

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how inflammation materializes in an atmospheric chemistry lab aiming to capture oxidation processes altering relations between airs, chemicals, and bodies. It shows how these material transformations reduce, but also complexify, the molecular and temporal politics of breathing.

Paper long abstract

The chemicals of late industrialism make us, literally, materially, as much as we make them. In this chemical regime of living (Murphy 2008), the air that sustains life, is also charged by the residues of modern ways of living and aspirations for progress, comfort, and abundance. The breathing that makes live, also alters life in toxic ways generating ambiguous forms of chemical kinship (Balayannis & Garnett 2020). Inflammation is a concept aiming to capture these ambiguous relations, providing a new site for theorizing relations between bodies, environments, and societies (Landecker 2024). How does inflammation materialize? Through which transformative processes? What do these molecular recompositions teach us about the politics of breathing (Selim 2022)? To address these questions, this paper proposes to explore inflammation enactments through an ethnography of an atmospheric chemistry lab aiming to produce new metrics of airborne pollutants. It will focus on three experimental apparatuses for measuring oxidation, an underlying and elemental process leading to inflammation in bodies. Each of these apparatuses arranges relations between airs, chemicals, and biologies in different ways, measuring, in turn, the oxidative potential of airborne pollutants and the traces of these molecular transformations in bodies. By following the practices of these technicians and scientists to capture oxidative biochemical reactions and transformations, I want to show how lab practices involve important work on scales, reducing, but also complexifying, the material, temporal, and political relations between airs, chemicals, and bodies.

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Paper short abstract

A phenomenological account of foreign substances is presented from the perspective of the exposed body. The theory can serve as a methodological cornerstone for writing ethnographies and histories of pollution in late industrialism.

Paper long abstract

The talk develops further the methodological approach of a phenomenology of substances, as introduced by Soentgen (1997). Soentgen proposes a distinction between ‘substances’ and ‘things’ with regard to their phenomenological qualities. Things—such as a coffee mug, a wristwatch, or a chair—have clear spatial boundaries, show different sides when turned around, are spatially cohesive, and visually exhibit a function. By contrast, substances (both natural and synthetic ones)—such as water, salt, hormones, PFAS, CFCs, or BPAs—are spatially diffuse, can be divided into increasingly fine portions, disperse and mix with environmental media, and follow intrinsic tendencies (e.g., to oxidize, to evaporate). Substances do not have agency, but exhibit an auto-activity. Substances are not alive, but appear vivid. In numerous ways, substances are ‘hard to grasp.’ Societal problems around chemistry directly reflect these characteristic phenomenological qualities of substances, e.g., when industrial pollutants take on a ‘life of their own.’

The talk enriches this theory by highlighting the phenomenological qualities of substances from the perspective of the exposed body. Three ideal-typical modes of exposure to substances are discerned: incorporation, immersion, and encountering substances as residues. Various examples are discussed to make these types of exposures tangible, ranging from vaccines to poison gas and environmental contaminants. These examples are theorized with concepts of foreignness (Simmel, Husserl, and Waldenfels) and motives of psychoanalysis (Freud and Blanchot). Taken together, these considerations present a body-oriented and ecologically attuned account of the uneasiness surrounding foreign substances, providing a methodological cornerstone for writing ethnographies and histories of pollution in late industrialism.

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Paper short abstract

This paper focuses on how PFAS are configured as environmental data objects and infrastructures in Denmark as climate change intensifies their risks. It also shows how digital archives support the study of PFAS–climate data practices as they reconfigure coastal place‑making and governance.

Paper long abstract

My paper examines how per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) become environmental data objects and infrastructures in Denmark, especially as climate change exacerbates PFAS risks. Also known as “forever chemicals,” PFAS are among the most persistent pollutants, yet recent research shows that rising temperatures, extreme rainfall, flooding, drought, and strong winds accelerate their mobility and expand exposure pathways. I thus approach PFAS as a climate‑exacerbated chemical hazard whose combinatory and cumulative risks challenge environmental governance regimes. I also show how PFAS data becomes integrated with intersecting climate risks in ways that reconfigure place-making and responsibility (Knox 2024).

My presentation draws on early ethnographic fieldwork among Danish researchers and enterprises developing PFAS data and knowledge infrastructures. Amid growing detection of PFAS in ocean sea spray and foam, I focus on how these infrastructures are situated and used within coastal communities. I follow emerging data practices to identify hotspots and inform remediation while addressing intersecting climate risks, examining how PFAS datasets integrate with flood‑risk, soil, and ocean‑surface data. Methodologically, I use a digital archive hosted on an instance of the Platform for Collaborative and Experimental Ethnography (PECE) that serves as an open research workspace for curating timelines, organizational profiles, and data visualizations that elicit reflection on PFAS–climate data double binds and gaps. My talk begins to theorize climate-exacerbated PFAS as an integrated data object and infrastructure, and invites feedback on the study design and on the use of ethnographic archives as sites where researchers and stakeholders jointly reconfigure PFAS–climate data in transformation.

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Paper short abstract

'1080' poison is central to the work of conservation in Aotearoa. A materialist analysis of the toxin points to the need to understand toxicities beyond frameworks of harm and exposure, to attend to how toxic effects are produced through situated practice and mediated by more-than-human actions.

Paper long abstract

In Aotearoa New Zealand conservation often means killing. Central to the lethal labour of pest control here is a ‘vertebrate toxic agent’ (a poison) known as 1080. The poison is lethal to almost every kind of mammal, though its blunt metabolic effects materialise differently in different species bodies. Drawing on a three-year research project into this toxin, this talk will explore the molecular workings of 1080 as it enters bodies and environments, is microbially dissembled and, often, swiftly dissolved. A close materialist analysis of the toxin reveals the futility of easy denunciation, and at the same time the fantasy of scientific certainty. It points to the need to understand toxicities beyond frameworks of harm and exposure, to attend to how toxic effects are produced through situated practice and mediated by more-than-human actions. Here, the lethal and the ephemeral go hand in hand, surfacing the need to think with temporalised materialities and the conditions under which they change.

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Paper short abstract

This paper follows ghabra (phosphate dust) in Tunisia’s mining basin to trace how extraction transforms rock into atmosphere. Attending to ghabra’s "phase shifts" (Choy & Zee, 2015) reveals how it escape containment, reconfigure breath, and shape multispecies life in late industrial landscapes.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines phosphate extraction in southern Tunisia through ghabra, the feral (Tsing, 2015) dust that escapes extractive choreographies and settles into bodies, landscapes, and narratives. Starting from the ethnographic insight that phosphate never fully leaves Gafsa's mining basin, but instead stays as ghabra, the article explores how extraction operates through material transformations that exceed spatial, technical, and political containment.

Drawing on ethnographic research, I follow phosphate through its transformations from blasted mountains to airborne particles, and from industrial categories of “steriles” to residues coating mountain slopes, skin, leaves, and homes. These transformations unsettle the distinction between product and waste and challenge the idea of a bounded workplace. As a material and affective dust, ghabra interferes with plant respiration and pollination, settles into lungs, redistributes labor into gendered practices of care, and appears metaphorically in nostalgic narratives of welfare provision that obscure the erosion of both industrial and social infrastructures.

Situating these dynamics within the longer histories of imperial extraction that have shaped Gafsa (Gruskin, 2021; Jackson, 2016), the paper foregrounds material transformation as a site where political economy becomes a question of breath and breathability. Attending to ghabra through "suspension" (Choy & Zee, 2015) as an art of noticing phase shifts, I trace how phosphate extraction configures socio-ecological relations at the interface of land and air. Ultimately, ghabra reveals extraction not only as an outward flow of commodities, but as an atmospheric condition that continues to shape life, labor, and breath in mining towns long after phosphate-as-commodity is gone.

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Paper short abstract

The residues left by France's nuclear tests in Algerian Sahara raise two questions: Are these enduring material lives a continuation of colonial violence? How are the transformations of supposedly diluted residues in a supposedly empty area determined and known by radiological experts?

Paper long abstract

The 15 nuclear bomb tests lead by France in the Algerian Sahara between 1960 and 1966 have enduring material lives in the form of long-lasting residues (Boudia et al. 2021, Felt 2025): vitrified sands, radioactive lava, half-buried irradiated materials, non-decommissioned facilities, circulating radionuclides. These continuously evolving materials have been the subject of a handful of reports, minimal governance (Hecht 2023), and, in recent years, conflicts over memory and responsibility between Algeria and France.

Drawing on reports and archival materials from the French army, the IAEA, critical expert groups, and interviews with experts, I will ask:

1. Are these lingering material lives a continuation of colonial violence (Liboiron 2021)? The tests and hasty abandonment of the sites happened during the troubled times of colonial war and France's short-lived postcolonial control over the Sahara after Algeria's independence. Moreover, the tests relied on contradictory assumptions about the Sahara being empty (yet populated by nomads who helped build the sites) and offering good dilution conditions (yet sequestering radioactivity in the rocks).

2. How are the transformations of these hypothetically diluted residues in a hypothetically empty land determined and known (Gille 2010) several decades later? How do expert inquiries since the 1990s support or contradict the former colonizer's claims? How are the sociomaterial relations in which these residues exist - with people, plants, animals, rocks and winds - made visible (or not)? How is colonial violence made visible (or not) using Geiger counters?

Keywords: nuclear; residues; bombs; radiological expertise; colonial violence; Algeria; France

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Paper short abstract

What does it mean to know a landscape in the final stages of degradation? Taking the case of a long-studied permafrost polygon in the Canadian Arctic, this paper asks how scientific sensing comes to terms with change and degradation in meaningful landscapes.

Paper long abstract

Inuvik, in Canada’s Western Arctic, has been a place of environmental scientific attention since the 1960s. Research on permafrost landscapes happens at sites in the nearby Mackenzie Delta and beyond. One such research site, only a short drive south of town, has been the subject of various projects for decades and hosts a plethora of active and abandoned sensors. Drawing on recent ethnographic fieldwork with researchers in Inuvik, I take the example of this particular permafrost polygon feature to discuss how scientific expertise recons with the change, and more specifically, degradation of a landscape.

In a series of experiments that have been ongoing at this site for decades, the near total degradation of the permafrost has been monitored and experienced by researchers, both as a set of data points and as visible, experienced change in the landscape. As buried thermo-probes and makeshift bridges fashioned from weathered shipping pallets have rendered this site into a sort of field-laboratory (Latour 1999), it also holds the memories of generations of scientists whose accumulated efforts helped make it into the place it is today. In this place, climate catastrophe is made real, both in terms of data (which can be used to model change in other locations) and in the experience of the melting and degrading permafrost.

As the more-than-human entanglement of permafrost, water, sensors, peat, and others melt into something else, what does it mean for environmental scientists to sense, measure, and document this change?

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Paper short abstract

I examine the place of rocks in the making of urban life in Hyderabad, India, and how, as a substance, it occupies the place of a solid-fluid, through their interaction with governance, culture, and capitalism.

Paper long abstract

Hyderabad in India lies atop the massive Deccan Plateau, characterized by the volcanic basalt that results in the rocky terrain that is carved out to make space for agriculture, urbanities, and cultural life. The granite formation in this region is millions of years old, and it remains the site of alterations and contestations as city developers meet the demands of an increasingly urbanized population (Lasania, 2022). Rocks are imagined to be enduring materials but years of weathering have sculpted these granites into “gravity-defying” shapes which look like they might collapse at any moment (Gupta, 2021). Local movements were set up to save the rocks from rapid urbanization, a cause that is considered significantly removed from other ecological concerns involving clean water, air, and forest cover due to the more obvious consequences to human life (Society To Save Rocks, 2015).

Through historical analysis and in-depth interviews with various actors, I trace the histories of the rocks as they interact with urban politics and publics, how they remain interpretively flexible (Pinch & Bijker, 2012) through the eyes of city governments, activists, historians, urban features like roads and buildings, and human & non-human species. Rocks, as a substance, remain understudied as a part of the Anthropocene, even as rocks are understood to be essentially entangled with civilization (Clark, 2022). This paper contributes to an understanding of the rock as a solid-fluid substance that emphasizes these entanglements of geology and urban cultures (Luque-Ayala & Nieuwenhuis, 2026; Verne et al., 2025; Wang, 2023).

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Paper short abstract

Not all oil is oil. Or rather, not all hydrocarbons are fluid when found in natural state underground. This material fact is of great importance to oil producing actors - but equally so for social scientists interested in unfolding the role energy producers play for democracy, state and politics.

Paper long abstract

The hydrocarbon bitumen in the Canadian oil sands differs greatly from North Sea oil, when it comes to physical properties and the natural state it is found in. This was never openly addressed by the Norwegian oil producer Equinor when arguing for entering the controversial site. They rather highlighted how expertise from producing oil on the Norwegian Continental Shelf made them fit to meet the challenges of the oil sands. This turned out not to be the case. Through my following of their doing, I came to learn that the hydrocarbon’s materiality pushed back, resisting to be converted to ‘real’ oil in any easy way - at least not in the ways the company anticipated. Not only did this make the oil sands project into an environmentally and economically difficult endeavor for the company; all the troubling also incited high temperatures in the public debates in Norway. Ethnographic work on this demanding project underpins how geologies of oil need to be made part of the picture: My research displays how the site itself, the place of origin and the natural state of the hydrocarbon matter – in the end also for societal acceptance of the resource in question. Attending to powerful actors’ concrete resource-making practices, how they perform their everyday extraction and conversion, is vital. This can represent a way for social scientists to play up counter-narratives of ‘it could have been otherwise’, by attending to the resistance more-than-human actors act out when sought transformed to oil ready for markets.

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Paper short abstract

By ethnographically tracing steel slags, by-products in steel production that engage with landscapes and people, this paper argues that a distribution of perplexity is required to form political collectives in the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses the steel slag, a by-product in steel production, as an infrastructure that engages in physicochemical interactions with landscapes and people, causing scientific controversies and policy debates. Conceptually, the study contributes to STS research by introducing the notion of the ‘distribution of perplexity’. Empirically and ethnographically, the paper draws on a case of steel slag contamination in the Netherlands. In different municipalities in the Netherlands, dust from the slags caused irritation and nose bleeds and the leaching of heavy metals polluted the soil and ground water. Through these material transformations, the slags turned from objects into issues that demanded to be taken into account by residents, environmental supervisors and researchers. Therefore, this paper argues that the formation of political collectives in the Anthropocene depends on a distribution of perplexity: the acknowledgement of the existence of new actors outside of the collective. This acknowledgement is captured by Bruno Latour’s notion of perplexity. Using methods that are common in ethnography, like interviews and document analysis, this study traces how perplexity is distributed across concerned residents, environmental supervisors and researchers. The study presents research findings on what non-human political actors like steel slags do in order to become visible and what enables residents, researchers and environmental policy makers to see and acknowledge new actors and to rearrange political collectives.

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Paper short abstract

From the 1890s, we chart the history and relationships between society’s attempts to couple and decouple electrons and molecules in transforming our energy system over time, taking a Valuation Studies perspective on how these materials were construed as “good” and what were they good “for”.

Paper long abstract

The expanding energy transition and ambitions for sector-coupling to de-carbonise beyond the power sector puts new demands on the transformation of green electrons into new molecular substances such as hydrogen that can be further converted into e-fuels. This is e.g. evidenced in plans for large-scale energy islands, HVDC offshore meshed grids, and production of hydrogen through Power-to-X electrolysis technologies. Based on a lens of Valuation Studies in STS and founded in document analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, we chart the history and relationships between science and technology’s use of various electrons and diverse molecules, how they over time have been connected, disconnected, and current visionary attempts to connect them again. We pay attention to the struggles to tame the instability of electrons and release the energy in stable molecules, by inquiring into what forms of expertise(s) have been central to these relationships and how have these relationships have been construed as “good” (e.g. ‘green’, ‘sustainable’) and what they were good “for”. We take outset in the work of the Danish inventor and educationalist, Poul la Cour, who in 1890 implemented a system that combined the unstable electrons from wind energy generation at direct current (DC) with the production of stable hydrogen molecules though the electrolysis of water, tracing how the configuration of infrastructures either favoured or disadvantaged such coupling of green electrons and molecules over time. We conclude by discussing what methods and concepts from ethnographic and historical inquiries can help to follow the transformation of materials and substances over time.

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Paper short abstract

Following plastic-degrading enzymes from microbial discovery to industrial hopes, this work shows how scaling challenges in enzymatic recycling are rooted in assumptions that exclude the material specificity of enzyme-plastic interactions in favor of linear claims of transferability.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Paper long abstract

In recent decades, the discovery of enzymes capable of degrading polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a ubiquitous polymer in packaging and textiles, has generated enthusiasm around enzymatic plastic recycling becoming a circular bioeconomy solution. Yet despite sustained investment on these technologies, they have not reached industrial scale. Arguing the challenges of scaling enzymatic recycling are sociotechnical in nature, this paper asks how the chemical-material qualities of PET-degrading enzymes shift as they move across different scales, and what these transformations reveal about the persistent difficulties of scaling within bioeconomy narratives.

Through a molecule-centered ethnographic approach, this research follows PET-degrading enzymes from microbial discovery to envisioned industrial deployment. It shows how scaling becomes enacted through competing meanings, all of which rest on foundational assumptions about optimization and metabolic equivalence that systematically exclude the contextual complexity of enzyme-plastic interactions. Across academic laboratories, start-ups, and industrial settings, scaling is simultaneously an act of generalization, assuming transferability despite acknowledging material specificity; of quantity, expecting linear and predictable volumetric effects; and of translation, hoping for seamless replacement of existing recycling infrastructures.

By foregrounding (bio)chemical reactions and relations, this work reveals how differing understandings of PET-degrading enzymes are shaped by material transformations that complicate linear promises of scalability, which continuously reconfigure scientific practice, industrial expectations, and sustainability claims around their future use. By doing so, this paper extends existing STS work on the processual nature of substances to industrial enzymology and, ultimately, argues for embracing uncertainty as a necessary condition for thinking toward sustainable futures around emerging biotechnologies.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​