Chemicals are one way of understanding the substance of being. In turn, synthetic chemicals have become an integral part of life ways and lifeforms across spatial and temporal scales. Chemicals are life-giving and debilitating. However, what exactly is a chemical?
In the 2024 Technoscience Salon, we ask ourselves this question inspired by multi-disciplinary works in the field of science and technology studies. Chemicals have been rendered differentially in sensory studies, studies of historical ontology, and inquiries into environmental health and justice. These works offer expansions on what the chemical is and how it might be recognized, apprehended, and manipulated. We invite scholars, artists, community organizers, and activists to collectively re-consider the prevailing scientific descriptions and studies of chemicals that reduce them to functionalist molecules for the sake of biopolitical management. To this end, what other ways of conceptualizing, representing, and relating to “the chemical” might we take up as we strive towards less harmful futures?
Emulsifiers, Gums and Clouding Agents: From the Mouthfeel of Capitalism to the Gelation of the Present
Hannah Landecker
Much concern has been expressed lately in the medical and popular press about the ultra-processing of foods as a health risk. That is, it is the process (high heat, molecular-level alteration) that matters, as much as the substance itself. Where calories or salt content or pesticide residues might have been of concern before, now there is process itself to worry about. In this talk I bring forward the concept of emulsification – or thickening, or clouding – for social and historical consideration. Working through an empirical archive of mid-to-late twentieth century industrial trade magazines, I show that the emulsifier as a class of mass produced chemical commodities extends well beyond foodstuffs and argue that it is impossible to understand the transformation of food without understanding the more general and pervasive remaking of emollience, smoothness, and miscibility in industrialized societies between 1950 and 2000. An emulsifier is a substance that keeps one liquid dispersed within another otherwise immiscible liquid, such as oil and water: one end of the emulsifier molecule is polar and attracts water, the other is non-polar and attracts oil. This talk goes both very high and very low with this concept, using the emulsifier to tether otherwise immiscible disciplines to one another, seeing if we can’t keep our philosophy and our health policy in mixed suspension for a while; talk salad dressing and the Anthropocene in the same breath; understand that there is a historical biology of aesthetics in operation within and around us – an anthropogenic biology that has in time become the contemporary object of the health sciences.
Hannah Landecker is a historian and sociologist of the life sciences. She holds a joint appointment in the Life and Social Sciences at UCLA, where she is a Professor in the Sociology Department, and the Institute for Society and Genetics, an interdisciplinary unit at UCLA committed to cultivating research and pedagogy at the interface of biology and society. Landecker is the author of Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies (Harvard UP, 2007), and has written widely on antimicrobial resistance, metabolism, and biotechnology. She is co-director of the UCLA Center for Reproductive Science, Health and Education at UCLA, and a member of the Senior Editorial team of BioSocieties.
Thursday 21 March 2024
4:00pm – 6:00pm EST
Seminar Room #10031
700 University Ave, Toronto, ON
Past Salons
Launched in 2008, the Technoscience Salon has been active for over 10 years. We invite you to look through our past events and follow the many entangled paths that the Salon has taken us down.
2020-21 :: Gathering Online (Organized by Vanbasten de Araujo, Sophie Jaworski, Lindsay LeBlanc, Sajdeep Soomal, and Dawn Walker, with support by Kristen Bos and Michelle Murphy)
2019-20 :: Consent and Its Discontents (Organized by Michelle Murphy and Kristen Bos)
2018-19 :: Black Technoscience “Here” (Organized by Nicole Charles, OmiSoore Dryden, Kristen Bos, and Michelle Murphy)
2017-18 :: Refusal & Repair: Decolonial Feminist Technoscience Tactics (Organized by Michelle Murphy and Kristen Bos)
2016-17 :: (De)Composing Futures (Organized by Natasha Myers, Patrick Keilty, and Michelle Murphy)
2015-16 :: Unsettling Practices (Organized by Michelle Murphy, Natasha Myers, Kelly Fritsch, Martina Schlünder, and Nehal El-Hadi)
2014-15 :: Activating Evidence (Organized by Natasha Myers and Metalab)
2013-14 :: Critical Itineraries (Organized by Michelle Murphy, Shiho Satsuka, and Sebastian Gil-Riaño)
2012-13 :: Ecologies (Organized by Michelle Murphy, Astrid Schrader, and Natasha Myers)
2011-12 :: Extensions (Organized by Michelle Murphy, Natasha Myers, and Sofie Afriat)
2010-11 :: Open Concept (Organized by Michelle Murphy, Natasha Myers, Emily Simmonds, and Sarah Tracy)
2008-09 :: Mix and Stir (Organized by Edward Jones-Imhotep, Michelle Murphy, Natasha Myers & Sergio Sismondo)
Technoscience Salon 