Center for Uncertainty Studies Blog

Together with Soraya Boudia (Paris), Angela N. H. Creager (Princeton), Scott Frickel (Brown), Emmanuel Henry (Paris-Daphine), Nathalie Jas (INRAE) and Jody A. Roberts (Philadelphia) he published the winning book Residues: Thinking Through Chemical Environments with Rutgers University Press in 2021.

Residues offers readers a new approach for conceptualizing the environmental impacts of chemicals production, consumption, disposal, and regulation. Environmental protection regimes tend to be highly segmented according to place, media, substance, and effect; academic scholarship often reflects this same segmented approach. Yet, in chemical substances Carsten Reinhardt and his colleagues encounter phenomena that are at once voluminous and miniscule, singular and ubiquitous, regulated yet unruly. Inspired by recent studies of materiality and infrastructures, they introduce “residual materialism” as a framework for attending to the socio-material properties of chemicals and their world-making powers. Tracking residues through time, space, and understanding them helps to see how the past has been built into our present chemical environments and future-oriented regulatory systems, why contaminants seem to always evade control, and why the Anthropocene is as inextricably harnessed to the synthesis of carbon into new molecules as it is driven by carbon’s combustion.

In addition to SKAT, the work was also well received by critics such as Sara Shostak, author of Exposed Science, who states: "This erudite and accessible book presents a novel theoretical framing that draws on examples from a multiplicity of intriguing case studies from across the globe. Residues is distinguished by its collaborative authorship and multi-disciplinary and multinational scope, seeking to change how scholars in a range of disciplines study chemicals."

We congratulate Carsten Reinhardt and his colleagues for this excellent achievement and look forward to further exchanging ideas and thoughts within CeUS.