Glyphosate and the swirl : an agroindustrial chemical on the move

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 "Glyphosate and the Swirl is an ethnography of the agricultural chemical glyphosate (the active ingredient in the weed killer Roundup) that engages in the debate over the safety of the chemical in the scientific and activist communities. Vincanne Adams argues that glyphosate is an unstable and unreliable actor that has caused chemical harm despite the fact that it has radically changed our food production. Embracing speculation as integral to the scientific process, Adams theorizes the "swirl"--an unstable body that is constantly moving, concentrating and dissipating, gaining traction and losing it, and refusing to settle--to describe both the circulation of glyphosate in our environment and the evolution of public and scholarly knowledge about it"-- Provided by publisher Contents 6 Acknowledgments 9 1 From Blossoms 11 2 Building the Food Chemosphere 26 3 Ontological Multiplicity & Glyphosate’s Safety 47 4 Chemical Life, Clinical Encounters 61 5 The Scientific Consensus & the Counterfactual 83 6 Consensuses, Academic Capitalism & the Swirl 107 7 Glyphosate Becomes an Activist 124 8 Chemicals as Agents of Care 140 Notes 149 References 155 Index 177 Vincanne Adams takes the complex chemical glyphosate—the active ingredient in Roundup and pervasive agricultural herbicide—to explore the formation of contested knowledge.