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Reactivating Elements

Reactivating Elements

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The contributors to Reactivating Elements examine chemicals as they mix with soil, air, water, and fire to shape Earth's troubled ecologies today. They invoke the elements with all their ambivalences as chemical categories, material substances, social forms, forces and energies, cosmological entities, and epistemic objects. Engaging with the nonlinear historical significance of elemental thought across fields—chemistry, the biosciences, engineering, physics, science and technology studies, the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and cultural studies—the contributors examine the relationship between chemistry and ecology, probe the logics that render wind as energy, excavate affective histories of ubiquitous substances such as plastics and radioactive elements, and chart the damage wrought by petrochemical industrialization. Throughout, the volume illuminates how elements become entangled with power and control, coloniality, racism, and extractive productivism while exploring alternative paths to environmental destruction. In so doing, it rethinks the relationship between the elements and the elemental, human and more-than-human worlds, today’s damaged ecosystems and other ecologies to come.
Contributors. Patrick Bresnihan, Tim Choy, Joseph Dumit, Cori Hayden, Stefan Helmreich, Joseph Masco, Michelle Murphy, Natasha Myers, Dimitris Papadopoulos, María Puig de la Bellacasa, Astrid Schrader, Isabelle Stengers The contributors to Reactiving Elements explore how studying elements—as the foundations of the physical and social world—provide a way to imagine alternatives to worldwide environmental destruction. Dimitris Papadopoulos is Professor of Science, Technology and Society at the University of Nottingham.
María Puig de la Bellacasa is Associate Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick.
Natasha Myers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University. Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. Elements: From Cosmology to Episteme and Back / Dimitris Papadopoulos, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and Natasha Myers  1
1. Receiving the Gift: Earthly Events, Chemical Invariants, and Elemental Powers / Isabelle Stengers  18
2. Chemicals, Ecology, and Reparative Justice / Dimitris Papadopoulos  34
3. Elementary Forms of Elementary Forms: Old, New, and Wavy / Stefan Helmreich  70
4. Substance as Method: Bromine, for Example / Joseph Dumit  84
5. Elemental Ghosts, Haunted Carbon Imaginaries, and Living Matter at the Edge of Life / Astrid Schrader  108
6. The Artificial World / Joseph Masco  131
7. Tilting at Windmills / Patrick Bresnihan  151
8. Crowding the Elements / Cori Hayden  176
9. Embracing Breakdown: Soil Ecopoethics and the Ambivalences of Remediation / Maria Puig de la Bellcasa  196
10. Externality, Breathers, Conspiracy: Forms for Atmospheric Reckoning / Tim Choy  231
11. Reimagining Chemicals, With and Against Technoscience / Michelle Murphy  257
Contributors  280
Index  285

“This is a book populated by many of my favorite writers, analysts, and storytellers. Here, they resituate elemental things for me once again. The book is a kind of periodic table for recharting possible responses to Earth’s troubled ecologies with verve and seriousness. These writers always take formal, aesthetic, and intellectual risks to say something important, and they have done it again. The book provokes curiosity because its authors are actually curious rather than self certain. Reactivating Elements is a book to savor!”
“Expanding on critiques of the Anthropocene, this compelling volume refreshingly offers new theoretical and methodological approaches to researching and responding to the multiple toxicities of late industrialism.”
“Tracking waves and wind, bromine, plutonium, and plastics—elemental thinking becomes a way to unsettle long-established category schemes and ways of working. Starting with a critique of how the periodic table itself organizes knowledge and practice, the collection shows how elemental thinking can become creative and animating rather than formulaic, provocative and generative rather than reductive and foreclosing. Paradoxes abound and are a powerful draw for contemporary cultural analysts.”
“The diversity of detailed subjects, methods, and philosophical underpinnings represented here ensures that most readers will find these well-written, engaging essays inspiring and challenging. . . . [Reactivating Elements] belongs in all good scholarly libraries, especially those with strong collections in science and technology studies (STS), science writing, and/or cultural criticism. Highly recommended.”

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Weight 1 oz
Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in