Feminist technoscientific research with chemicals is proliferating. This critical commentary considers how this scholarship extends environmental justice research on pollution. We are concerned with two key questions: How can we do/design ethical research with chemicals? And, what methods allow for researching chemicals without resorting to an imagined space of purity? We consider unfolding projects which reorient relations with chemicals from villainous objects with violent effects, to chemical kin. We imagine chemical kinship as a concept, an analytical tool, and a mode of relating. Emerging through feminist and anticolonial work with chemicals, it involves a tentativeness towards making normative claims about chemicals because, like kin, these materials are never entirely good nor bad, at once they can both be enabling and harmful. This commentary considers what the unfolding research with chemicals generates, and consolidates conceptualisations of chemical kinship; we ultimately articulate an agenda for ethical research with chemicals as an experimental process of invention.

Feminist technoscientific research with chemicals is proliferating. This critical commentary considers how this scholarship extends environmental justice research on pollution. We are concerned with two key questions: How can we do/design ethical research with chemicals? And, what methods allow for researching chemicals without resorting to an imagined space of purity? We consider unfolding projects which reorient relations with chemicals from villainous objects with violent effects, to chemical kin. We imagine chemical kinship as a concept, an analytical tool, and a mode of relating. Emerging through feminist and anticolonial work with chemicals, it involves a tentativeness towards making normative claims about chemicals because, like kin, these materials are never entirely good nor bad, at once they can both be enabling and harmful. This commentary considers what the unfolding research with chemicals generates, and consolidates conceptualisations of chemical kinship; we ultimately articulate an agenda for ethical research with chemicals as an experimental process of invention.

This paper examines the geographies of hazardous waste removal. Over the past decade, studies of disposal have demonstrated the myriad ways in which things can never disappear – they can only be transformed, transmuted, combusted, combined or any other manner of material change. This paper aims to develop understandings of the material politics of disposal by considering the matter of representation. It does this ethnographically, by following a chemical stockpile though the process of removal from its storage site in Tanzania. In examining everyday disposal practices, this paper highlights the materialities of hazardous waste in ways that have been epistemologically side-lined. Locating the analysis at the intersection of matter and representation, the paper illustrates the centrality of paper-work, diagrams, photographs and standard operating procedures in performing removal. It argues that removal is achieved through a bureaucratic spectacle; a process which obscures lingering residues and compounds their toxic effects. By attending to chemicals through the mundane work of removal, this paper opens up different lines of inquiry for studies of waste, and enriches understandings of materiality by considering how visual representations make a difference.

The world is overflowing with the discards of twentieth century chemistry. Industrial chemicals are unruly materials, transgressing spatial and temporal boundaries – found accumulating even in the vast depths of the Mariana Trench. Yet geography has largely taken the materialities of these chemicals for granted. The discipline has a long tradition of researching materials and material cultures, however, the things examined are largely limited to stuff that is visible, stable, touchable, familiar, and coherent. This thesis aims to extend conceptualisations of materiality within human geography by examining the material geographies of pesticides in disposal. It pursues an object of analysis that is incoherent, volatile, mobile, highly distributed, and persistent.

This thesis considers the after-lives dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane – better known as DDT. This Nobel Prize-winning pesticide is both celebrated and condemned for its persistence and toxicity. This thesis assembles the material biography of an obsolete DDT stockpile: 250 tonnes of banned, expired, and damaged pesticides with an elusive origin. Obsolete pesticides have been identified by environmental organisations such as the Green Cross as one of the most toxic threats to life on earth. Yet the disposal of pesticides has been overlooked within the social sciences; questions of how stockpiles emerge and what processes are involved in their management have yet to be considered. This thesis uses a follow-the-thing methodology to trace the residues of this DDT stockpile across space and time through unending processes of disposal. The multi-sited ethnography spans five countries and two continents, assembling the material biography of an object that extends over three decades.

In following the life of this stockpile, three key processes of disposal emerged: storage, removal, and incineration. This thesis is structured around these three hotspots of activity. The life of the stockpile is narrated through process stories that are attuned to the everyday practices of pesticide disposal. Two broad interconnected arguments are forwarded in this thesis: first, that disposal is always incomplete; the residues of this stockpile linger and accumulate in the bodies and places they come to inhabit. and second, that although disposal is materially impossible, pesticides can be erased representationally – in ways that conceal the ongoing and uneven material histories of industrial chemistry. This thesis expands human geography’s material repertoire, and in doing so enables new sites, practices, processes, and material politics of disposal to emerge. It ontologically re-imagines pesticides and offers a methodological approach for considering industrial chemicals through their residues, in both material and representational terms. This thesis ultimately demonstrates how representation comes to matter in material geographies, and the ways that the repetitiveness of disposal has cumulative effects with significant ethical repercussions.

Knowledge of suicide is made through violent epistemologies that sever self-destruction from space, time, and place. As an inherently incomprehensible issue, efforts to make sense of suicide through abstraction have the paradoxical effect of inhibiting understanding. This paper argues that the incoherences characteristic of suicide are not an obstacle for knowing, but rather a cause to accept knowledge that is partial and indirect. Thinking with assemblage, this paper develops a relational conceptualization of distance to interrogate the knowledge that shapes pesticide suicide in India; ‘distancing-through-engagement’ brings to light the contradictions and obscured power relations through which understandings of suicide are made.