Main description:

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.

Contents:

Acknowledgments ix
1. From Blossoms 1
2. Building the Food Chemosphere 16
3. Ontological Multiplicity & Glyphosate's Safety 37
4. Chemical Life, Clinical Encounters 51
5. The Scientific Consensus & the Counterfactual 73
6. Consensuses, Academic Capitalism & the Swirl 97
7. Glyphosate Becomes an Activist 114
8. Chemicals as Agents of Care 130
Notes 139
References 145
Index 167