Duke University Press Reactivating Elements: Chemistry, Ecology, Practice

The contributors to Reactivating Elements examine chemicals as they mix with soil, air, water, and fire to shape Earth\x27s 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 fieldschemistry, the biosciences, engineering, physics, science and technology studies, the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and cultural studiesthe 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, todays 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 Review "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!"--Donna J. Haraway, author of "Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene" About the Author Dimitris Papadopoulos is Professor of Science, Technology and Society at the University of Nottingham. María Puig de la Bellacasa is Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. Natasha Myers is Associate Professor at York University.