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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.