Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move
In Glyphosate and the Swirl Vincanne Adams explores the chemical glyphosate—the active ingredient in Roundup and a pervasive agricultural herbicide—as a predicament of contested science and chemically saturated life. Adams traces the history of glyphosate’s invention and its multiple uses as activists, regulators, scientists, clinicians, consumers, and sick people try to determine its safety and harm. Scientific and political debates over glyphosate’s toxicity are agitated into a swirl—a condition in which certainty is continually contested, divided, and multiplied. This movement replicates the chemical’s movement in soils, foods, bodies, archives, labs, and legislative bodies, settling in some places here and in other places there, its potencies changing and altering what it touches with different scales and kinds of impact. The swirl is both an artifact of academic capitalism, activist tactics, and contested scientific facts and a way to capture the complexity of contemporary life with chemicals.
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Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move
In Glyphosate and the Swirl Vincanne Adams explores the chemical glyphosate—the active ingredient in Roundup and a pervasive agricultural herbicide—as a predicament of contested science and chemically saturated life. Adams traces the history of glyphosate’s invention and its multiple uses as activists, regulators, scientists, clinicians, consumers, and sick people try to determine its safety and harm. Scientific and political debates over glyphosate’s toxicity are agitated into a swirl—a condition in which certainty is continually contested, divided, and multiplied. This movement replicates the chemical’s movement in soils, foods, bodies, archives, labs, and legislative bodies, settling in some places here and in other places there, its potencies changing and altering what it touches with different scales and kinds of impact. The swirl is both an artifact of academic capitalism, activist tactics, and contested scientific facts and a way to capture the complexity of contemporary life with chemicals.
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Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move

Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move

by Vincanne Adams
Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move
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Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move

Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move

by Vincanne Adams

Overview

In Glyphosate and the Swirl Vincanne Adams explores the chemical glyphosate—the active ingredient in Roundup and a pervasive agricultural herbicide—as a predicament of contested science and chemically saturated life. Adams traces the history of glyphosate’s invention and its multiple uses as activists, regulators, scientists, clinicians, consumers, and sick people try to determine its safety and harm. Scientific and political debates over glyphosate’s toxicity are agitated into a swirl—a condition in which certainty is continually contested, divided, and multiplied. This movement replicates the chemical’s movement in soils, foods, bodies, archives, labs, and legislative bodies, settling in some places here and in other places there, its potencies changing and altering what it touches with different scales and kinds of impact. The swirl is both an artifact of academic capitalism, activist tactics, and contested scientific facts and a way to capture the complexity of contemporary life with chemicals.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781478024033
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication date: 12/05/2022
Series: Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 184
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Vincanne Adams is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of California, San Francisco, author of Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina, and coeditor of Arc of Interference: Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge, both also published by Duke University Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
1. From Blossoms  1
2. Building the Food Chemosphere  16
3. Ontological Multiplicity & Glyphosate’s Safety  37
4. Chemical Life, Clinical Encounters  51
5. The Scientific Consensus & the Counterfactual  73
6. Consensuses, Academic Capitalism & the Swirl  97
7. Glyphosate Becomes an Activist  114
8. Chemicals as Agents of Care  130
Notes  139
References  145
Index  167

What People are Saying About This

Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World - Kath Weston

“Using the Monsanto-produced biochemical substance glyphosate to disrupt the ‘settled/unsettled science’ binary, Vincanne Adams takes apart received notions about scientific consensus by demonstrating that the continual production of uncertainty about biochemical harm more adequately describes how knowledge production works. In an age of political polarization that is continuously reconfiguring bodies of both organisms and scholarship, Glyphosate and the Swirl has much to offer not only those concerned with environmental issues and public health but anyone engaged in activist scholarship.”

The Economization of Life - Michelle Murphy

“Brilliantly guiding us into the swirl, Vincanne Adams rethinks the problem of uncertainty that plagues environmental health politics, suggesting a path that does not just turn to science to decide what harms profit-driven chemicals and foods are putting into the world. With clarity and originality, Adams addresses how knowledge-making norms are enrolled in an epistemic condition that is strategically employed by industry-funded science rather than just the virtue it is presented to be.”

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