Manuel Tironi’s research while affiliated with Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and other places

After decades of commercialization, genetically modified (GM) crops continue to generate controversy. Countries have developed different GM regulatory styles based on their risk frames, institutional arrangements, and participation modes. Our objective was to understand the development of Chile’s unique regulatory style. We reconstructed the use and regulatory evolution of the technology, identified key actors in the controversy, and compared Chile with other approaches. Chile’s style is ambivalent: restricting commercial use to seed-export but permissive in other domains. This approach reflects a market-caution framing of the issue focused on developing a promising agriculture sub-sector. Thus, Chile became a southern seed nursery for the GM industry. Opponents responded by framing their concerns around a basic demand for public information and transparency. Our case illustrates the challenges and relevance of discussing new technologies in emerging democracies. Access to information, early debates and greater transparency are key to evaluate new technologies in these contexts.

The invention of new forms of geo-social knowledge has become one of the imperatives to resist the so-called Anthropocene. Critical theorists have called for enhanced interdisciplinary collaborations between the earth sciences and the social sciences and humanities to disrupt conventional nature/culture divisions and imagine more sustainable futures. The condition for such geo-social encounters, the argument goes, is the politicization of the geosciences, or the correction of their abstracted modes of knowing. Inspired by feminist science studies and geophilosophies, in this article I follow geophysicists to find in their encounters with lithic things alternative modes of knowledge production. By tracking ethnographically their scientific practices, I try to render visible the pragmatics of the abstractions through which they attempt at apprehending inhuman elements and processes. Particularly, I identify two geophysical operations. First, what I call the geo-affective operation of geophysics, or its constitution on a sensual and embodied ecology that does not suspend the abyssal difference between ‘us’ and the radical alterity of geological things, but is rather the consequence of an open being-with inorganic matter. Second, I engage with geo-poetics as a genre of scientific narration that integrates geological entities into scientific accounts, while at the same time preserving their impossible distance with the human. Both operations, I argue, gesture towards a mode of geo-social knowledge in which geophysical abstraction-making, against the call of critical theorists, is empowered to avoid anthropocentric absorptions and symbioses – and hence towards the reformulation of what politicization means in catastrophic times.

In public discourse and much sociological research disasters are understood as critical situations in which the engagement of citizens is critical to rebuild the political, material and social texture sustaining everyday life. However, it remains unclear how post-disaster participatory techniques help in the modulation of certain types of citizens. In this article we ask: Do disasters, as a specific setting of participation, qualify or specify how citizenship is construed, thought, and brought into being? Drawing on the case of the 2010 earthquake and tsunami in Chile, we explore the role of responsibility distribution, inscribed in the organization and deployment of participatory exercises, in the performativity of citizens. Using in-depth interviews, ethnographic data and archival material we compare three different post-disaster participatory interventions, what we term participation apparatuses. Describing how participation theories and techniques were mobilized to define “who ought to do what,” we argue that different participation apparatuses enacted distinctive responsible publics. We label these publics the epistemic, decisional and narrative responsible publics. Our larger point is that research on the performativity of participation requires an expansion of both the settings of public participation and the mechanisms of performativity within participation apparatuses.

In this report, we reflect on the 2-day thinkshop 'Figuring disasters: methodological speculations in exorbitant worlds' held in Valparaíso, Chile. The thinkshop aimed at discussing the possibility of inventing new genres for the figuration, representation and visualisation of distributed and processual geoclimatic disruptions. For this report, we assembled a choral essay in which each one of the participants selected one object of our visit to Messana-an informal settlement in the outskirts of Valparaíso that was severely damaged by the 2017 fires-and knit around, from and with it a reflection on the thinkshop and its questions. The report is thus fractionary. We do not look for wholes, perhaps as disasters themselves problematise linear narratives. We prefer to be attentive to what each one of us inherited from Messana and to stage that sensibility in a multiplicity, though adventures into what disasters as methods can and should be.

Deemed as technocratic and exclusionary, disaster management has failed in its promise of knowing, let alone controlling, catastrophic events. Consequently, disaster managers are searching outside of science for sense‐making analytics. This paper analyses the emergent narratives articulated by disaster managers in Chile to cope with the uncertain nature of their object of intervention. It explores how knowledge of disasters is modified and enriched by disaster managers in what is termed here as ‘lateral knowledge’: the epistemic adjustment by which practitioners revalidate their expert status by expanding key assumptions about disaster risk reduction. The study, which draws on in‐depth interviews with disaster managers in Chile, suggests that lateral knowledge is established both through the increasing validation of community knowledge and the recognition of politics as a critical mediator in the practice of disaster management. The paper concludes by making the larger point that public understanding of science scholars should pay more attention to the adapting capacities of expertise.

Chemical toxicity is part of everyday life in Puchuncaví. The most polluted industrial compound in Chile, Puchuncaví is home of fourteen industrial complexes, including the largest copper smelting plant in the country and four thermoelectric plants. Stories of biological mutation, corrosion and death among plants, humans, fishes and cattle are proliferate in Puchuncaví. Engaging with the growing interest in care and affective modes of attention within STS, this paper examines how ill, intoxicated or otherwise affected people in Puchuncaví act upon and know about their chronic sufferings. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I focus on what I call ‘hypo-interventions’, or the minimal and unspectacular yet life-enabling practices of caring, cleaning and healing the ailments of their significant others, human and otherwise. By minutely engaging with somatic and affective alterations in the domestic spaces of the body, the home and the garden, Puchuncavinos render industrial harm visible and knowable, and hence a type of political action is invoked. While outside technical validation and alien to conventional politics, these actions have proved crucial for people in Puchuncaví striving to persevere in the face of industrial violence and institutional abandonment. I coin the term ‘intimate activism’ to describe the ethical and political affordances of the subdued doings and engagements deployed in Puchuncaví. Intimate activism, I claim, draws its political power on its capacity to create minimal conditions for ethical and material endurance.

Toxicity has become a ubiquitous, if uneven, condition. Toxicity can allow us to focus on how forms of life and their constituent relations, from the scale of cells to that of ways of life, are enabled, constrained and extinguished within broader power systems. Toxicity both disrupts existing orders and ways of life at some scales, while simultaneously enabling and maintaining ways of life at other scales. The articles in this special issue on toxic politics examine power relations and actions that have the potential for an otherwise. Yet, rather than focus on a politics that depends on the capture of social power via publics, charismatic images, shared epistemologies and controversy, we look to forms of slow, intimate activism based in ethics rather than achievement. One of the goals of this introduction and its special issue is to move concepts of toxicity away from fetishized and evidentiary regimes premised on wayward molecules behaving badly, so that toxicity can be understood in terms of reproductions of power and justice. The second goal is to move politics in a diversity of directions that can texture and expand concepts of agency and action in a permanently polluted world.

In this choral essay we, an assorted group of academics interested in inorganic life and matter, explore a mode of thinking and feeling with our objects of inquiry—chemicals, waste, cement, gas, and the “project” as a particular form of circulation and enactment of materials and things. To experiment with alternative modes of knowing, we went to Puchuncaví, the largest, oldest, and most polluting industrial compound in Chile, to encounter the inorganic through and with its inorganicness and to attend to the situated, historicized, and political composition of both our materials and our experiences. Thinking of this as a collective provocation, we do not rehearse a conventional argument. Its parts are connected but only partially. There is no dramatic arc but rather an attempt at composing an atmosphere through which our thought and feelings are invoked. We have made visible the authorship behind each of the stories recounted here to celebrate the multivocality of our collaboration and to rehearse a nonabstracted mode of attention to Puchuncaví and the inorganic forces and entities we encountered there. We connect our irritations and speculations with the Anthropocene precisely as a way of summoning the multiple violences, many of them of planetary reach, that have to be denounced when situating our knowledge practices in Puchuncaví. Thinking about the ethico-political challenges of research in territories that have been, and are being, transformed under the weighty history of contamination and that are lived in and lived with by generations of beings (human and otherwise), we call in our concluding remarks for an enhanced pedagogy of care born of our inherited pasts and of engagement, interest, and becoming as response-ability.

In this review, we report the main discussions and concepts debated in the workshop " Animals and Politics: Explorations for a More-Than-Human Democracy, " the first academic event on animal studies in Chile. After a brief overview of the workshop, we summarize its results by identifying three broad conversations that cut across the workshop—borders, affects, and effects.