Hepler-SmithE VtP Collaboration Biography

Participation in VtS last year, coupled with plans for research and teaching (beginning in fall 2020) that I am organizing under an umbrella I am calling Remapping Chemicals, Environments, and Toxicity.Remapping Chemicals builds on my current book project, Compound Words, a history of the molecule-by-molecule worldview of the chemical sciences (narrowly construed), focusing on how this default ontology (so to speak) was embodied in and co-entrenched with information infrastructures (first print, then also machine-based) and bureaucratic procedures. First established first and foremost to advance the interests of research and development in the synthetic chemicals industry, these infrastructures and bureaucratic models were taken up for all sorts of other purposes, including state agencies and regulatory-affairs apparatus established to administer environmental regulations in the late 20th century. The book is, among other things, an historical-ontology account of the genesis of the epistemological aporias of assessing and controlling toxicity in light of what is sometimes called the “exposome”: the ubiquitous global circulation, accumulation, exposure, and variously synergistic interactions among zillions of chemical substances with distinct molecular structures and thus (according to this default ontology) distinct biological properties. Molecular bureaucracy is only a small part of the explanation for why we’re in this mess. But it has much to do with why we think we’re in this mess.The question of what other sorts of messes we might be in, and whether some of them might in some limited ways might be more tractable, animates Remapping Chemicals. I would like to open up each of these categories—the identity of chemicals, the geography of environments, and the ambiguities and multiplicities of toxicity—and see what comes of letting them emerge from historical study of the movements and transformations of various kinds of substances. I am building here on lots of good work (very much including the work of other participants in this project) about chemical residues, information systems, long-distance chemical transport (via environmental media as well as built transportation infrastructure), large-scale metabolic cycles, and the animacies and naturecultures of plant, mineral, and synthetic substances.The subject matter of this project (both in its research and teaching aspects) will be material families, by which I mean groups constituted by informally construed family resemblance in the late-Wittgenstein sense. (e.g. indigo dye; quinine-cinchona-peruvian bark; organochlorine pesticides produced from petrochemical feedstocks; fluorinated organic compounds…). The method—and here I finally get to my answer to this question—will be to follow the movements of these materials (along various vectors of force, purpose, and contingency), paying special attention to their various intersections, e.g. the meeting of quinine and indigo molecules in European chemistry labs as brass-ring goals for synthetic organic chemistry at precisely the same time cinchona, extracted from Peru and cultivated at Kew, was being planted in colonial India to help fight the malaria among workers on indigo plantations.I want to see what sorts of comparative and connected relations of place (as well as time) emerge when I follow these material itineraries. This is the “remapping environments” part of the project. The same goes for toxicity and comparative and connected relations within and among bodies and other sites of toxic phenomena – although I have **really** not yet thought through this dimension of the project, except for a commitment to pursuing it in a desire-based rather than damage-based fashion, drawing on the framework wonderfully articulated by the education and indigenous studies scholar Eve Tuck that I have learned about through the work of Michelle Murphy and Nick Shapiro (now just up the road at UCLA!).So I am eager to use this project to start thinking with and about place vis-à-vis toxicity, and to learn more (as a habitual loner in my own research) about collaborative work. I am pretty certain that Remapping Chemicals will have to have a major collaborative dimension if something substantive is to come of it. It will behoove me to observe and think about working collaboratively on this sort of stuff before I ask my undergrads to do so in the fall!