Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography

An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move

Vincanne Adams

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781478024033
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. From Blossoms
• 2. Building the Food Chemosphere
• 3. Ontological Multiplicity & Glyphosate’s Safety
• 4. Chemical Life, Clinical Encounters
• 5. The Scientific Consensus & the Counterfactual
• 6. Consensuses, Academic Capitalism & the Swirl
• 7. Glyphosate Becomes an Activist
• 8. Chemicals as Agents of Care
• Notes
• References
• Index