Glyphosate and the Swirl

In Glyphosate and the Swirl Vincanne Adams explores the chemical glyphosate—the active ingredient in Roundup and 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 among activists, regulators, scientists, clinicians, consumers, and sick people as they 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 some places here and other places there, its potencies changing and altering what it touches as it goes with different scales and kinds of impact. The swirl is both an artifact of academic capitalism, activist tactics, contested scientific facts, and a way to capture the complexity of contemporary life with chemicals.

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.