Reactivating Elements: Chemistry, Ecology, Practice

Elements

by Dimitris Papadopoulos (Editor), Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (Editor), Natasha Myers (Editor)

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

304 pages, Hardcover

Published January 4, 2022

About the author

Dimitris Papadopoulos is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Nottingham and coauthor of Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-First Century and Analysing Everyday Experience: Social Research and Political Change.

Reviews

[Silje · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was considering giving this one a five star rating. The concept of the book is excellent, and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s chapter has been following me around since I met it spring 2024. There is so much brilliance in this book, but of course not all the chapters resonate to the same extent. I got the library to buy this book for me. Now I had to return it. It’s a book I will keep coming back to. And I will keep quoting “Embracing Breakdown” until I totally compost myself into food for some ruderal plants breaking up surfaces and rendering life elemental while not knowing whether life is death is life around me. Central part of my journey.

[Lizzy Karnaukh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Books of academic essays always take me a while but for good reason! Interesting food for thought, as the authors offer new theoretical frameworks through which we can understand and emerge from the ecological crises we find ourselves in. Side note - really appreciate STS delving into chemistry.