Andrew Barry: The Geography of Chemicals
Tuesday 28 January 2025
4:00pm - 6:00pm EST
Seminar Room #10031
700 University Ave, Toronto, ON
University of Toronto
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This talk addresses three themes that are common to chemical and geographical thought that together shed light on the broader question of ‘what is a chemical?’. The first is the temporality of chemical substances and, specifically, their accumulation over time, across generations, creating shifting distributions and compositions of chemical substances. Chemical geography, which was initially defined in terms of the imperial control of mineral resources, or what today has come to be called the problem of ‘critical minerals’, is necessarily concerned with the political geography of novel chemical substances, including toxic materials, and their uneven accumulation. The second theme is scale, a topic that has long been central to the identity of both Geography and Chemistry as disciplines. After all, Chemistry is a science that dwells on the problem of how to understand the relation between the microchemical, including molecular and atomic structures, and macrochemical phenomena such as water pollution the depletion of the ozone layer. Here I focus not on discrete and purified chemical substances, but on the multiple relations between the micro and the macrochemical that are central to the question of what is a chemical, and its politics. The third theme is sensing, and the diverse ways in which the presence, transformation and circulation of chemicals has come to be both registered and supplemented through being recorded. I sketch a history of sensing the chemical, through the ongoing use of animals as proxies through which the presence of toxic chemicals has been recognised, to the development of citizen action and science, and technologies of sensing including isotopic environmental chemistry, remote sensing, and computer simulation. While the range of chemical substances proliferates, the presence of chemicals is registered in multiple ways, generating new ‘informed materials’, and supplemented by vast data bases. The politics and geography of the chemical revolve around all these three themes: accumulation, scale, and sensing.
Andrew Barry is Professor of Human Geography at University College London. He studied Physics, Chemistry and the History of and Philosophy of Science, and subsequently completed a PhD in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Sussex. He has been involved in a series of innovative institutional initiatives including the development of the Centre for Study of Invention and Social Process at Goldsmiths College, the UCL Anthropocene initiative, and the Chemical Exposures research group. His publications include: Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society; Foucault and Political Reason; Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences; and Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline. He is currently writing a book on Chemical Geography.