Glyphosate and the Swirl Adams

Glyphosate and the Swirl

An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move VINCANNE ADAMS

“Using the Monsanto-produced biochemical substance glyphosate to disrupt the ‘settled/unsettled science’ binary, Vincanne Adams takes apart received notions about scientific consensus by demonstrating that the continual production of uncertainty about biochemical harm more adequately describes how knowledge production works. In an age of political polarization that is continuously reconfiguring bodies of both organisms and scholarship, Glyphosate and the Swirl has much to offer not only those concerned with environmental issues and public health but anyone engaged in activist scholarship.”—KATH WESTON, author of Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World

“Brilliantly guiding us into the swirl, Vincanne Adams rethinks the problem of uncertainty that plagues environmental health politics, suggesting a path that does not just turn to science to decide what harms profit-driven chemicals and foods are putting into the world. With clarity and originality, Adams addresses how knowledge-making norms are enrolled in an epistemic condition that is strategically employed by industry-funded science rather than just the virtue it is presented to be.” —MICHELLE MURPHY, author of The Economization of Life

Glyphosate

the

An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move

Vincanne Adams Swirl

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.

CRITICAL GLOBAL HEALTH: EVIDENCE, EFFICACY, ETHNOGRAPHY A series edited by Vincanne Adams and João Biehl

Also by Vincanne Adams

February 184 pages, 3 illustrations paper, 978-1-4780-1675-5 $24.95/£21.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1941-1 $94.95/£85.00

Vincanne Adams is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of California, San Francisco, author of Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina, and coeditor of Arc of Interference: Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge, both also published by Duke University Press.

Markets of sorrow, Labors of faith

VINCANNE ADAMS, EDITOR METRICS

Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina

paper, $25.95/£22.99 978-0-8223-5449-9 / 2013

Metrics What Counts in Global Health

paper, $26.95/£24.99 978-0-8223-6097-1 / 2016