coe035_agard-jones.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:26] Welcome back, Cultures of Energy podcast listeners. As always, we're thrilled that you're with us and you are about to embark on a wonderful conversation that we just had with Vanessa Agard Jones. I think I'm pronouncing her surname right. I hope so. She's an assistant professor of anthropology at Columbia University, and she's also on the Executive Council there at Columbia for the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality. And so what we love about Vanessa, among other things, is that she's a bona fide feminist queer scholar who brings all of those important theoretical threads into conversation with questions about environmental justice and particularly the hemisphere, not the chemo sphere. Because that sounds like we're getting some sort of cancer treatment, but the hemisphere. And as we discussed in this conversation, there's there's been a kind of chemical turn going on, and Vanessa is at the forefront of it and picking up speed.

Speaker2: [00:01:30] So yeah, absolutely. And it's been it's been fascinating to watch that unfold in the past, I guess few years, really. It's very I think it's very new, but we've seen, you know, through our other lives as journal editors. And yeah, no, she was terrific. We had a great conversation with her. And I'm not just saying that, even though I say that every week.

Speaker1: [00:01:51] So what were you going to say? You're going to say something about, Oh, just about talking to me about toxicity and toxins.

Speaker2: [00:01:56] You're going to talk about two types of toxicity. We were talking about environmental toxicity, and then I think we were going to talk about patriarchal toxicity. Yeah, which made a brief and unfortunate appearance in this conversation. What I thought myself mansplaining.

Speaker1: [00:02:10] Yeah, it's just habit. I mean, that's all. It's just habit. And maybe you need to find some. I don't know. Maybe there's some chemical mediation that you could imbibe going back to our conversation. Is there a Tim Morton?

Speaker2: [00:02:22] Is there a chemical that will cure patriarchy? That would be pretty awesome.

Speaker1: [00:02:26] Well, that was part of my question to him. I mean, that is like the masters of anxiety there, too, I'm

Speaker2: [00:02:31] Telling you admit. One thing, I'm sure it's not methamphetamines, but

Speaker1: [00:02:35] That's what I'm going to do it. Yeah. Although we do have a little moment with meth here. Yes, chemicals are our friends in many ways, and toxicity is generally not our friends, although there is, of course, an analogy to be made between intoxication and toxicity. And in fact, what alcohol does to the brain is toxic, but it gives you a certain gives one a certain feeling right. So sometimes toxic vacations can have what some humans think is a pleasant effect, up to a degree because too much intoxication, too much toxicity in the brain and the blood can be really quite painful.

Speaker2: [00:03:16] I won't share drug stories, but I will. I will share a story about when I was in college and took this drugs in society class, and that class was actually paid for, I think, by war on drugs money. But it was a total boondoggle and in the end, you know, kind of hippie hippie teacher kind of trying to simulate psychedelic experiences by flipping the lights on and off really fast and shaking up a paper

Speaker1: [00:03:39] Bag and having to have a seizure know that can help.

Speaker2: [00:03:42] It was totally a hookup point for all the drug dealers on campus. They took that guy and their clients. But the funny thing is that I was introduced through that class to Andrew Wiles or Dr. Andrew Weil, who, of course, is, among other things, has theorized that, you know, altered states of consciousness and intoxication. As a fundamentally human thing. We all are searching for that. We crave it. And whether we do it through exercise or we do it through popping pills, that's that's kind of who we are.

Speaker1: [00:04:09] Did he come up with that? I came up with that too, actually. I mean, everywhere you look. It really is. I can't think of a quote unquote culture or social. Grouping of human beings anywhere in history that didn't somehow take advantage of an altered state of reality. Maybe I'm wrong and and I definitely could be, and if I am, please put a note on our iTunes page or something like that. But yeah, just like

Speaker2: [00:04:37] Just like that one really, really sober culture that like never did anything. And we're kind of miserable. I think the binding probably,

Speaker1: [00:04:44] Well, maybe the beginning. But come on. I mean, they, you know, they have a biologically rich environment that they live and you could just go and like, smell the flowers in Papua New Guinea and probably get a little buzz. I would think, right? Maybe not nowadays. But anyway, toxicity is also it's a serious thing. And you know, we talked about Flint and we talked a little bit about environmental justice and those and the kind of parallels between Anthropocene consciousness and climate consciousness, right?

Speaker2: [00:05:13] So we made it we made it clear distinction between good chemicals and bad chemicals. Or maybe it wasn't so clear.

Speaker1: [00:05:18] But yeah, but then they segue. Sometimes they segue into, you know, good stuff can become bad stuff like, we're talking about the estrogen. You know, if you're transitioning your gender transitioning and you're using synthetic estrogen. But yet we know that estrogen can be really destructive in waterways and cause all kinds of problems for fish and other critters,

Speaker2: [00:05:38] Including humans, sometimes

Speaker1: [00:05:39] Including humans. Yeah, yeah. Beware the tofu. Oh my gosh, that's a whole other conversation during one of our vegan podcasts.

Speaker2: [00:05:48] Right? But I mean, just I think what's interesting about this is and the work that Vanessa and her colleagues and peers are doing is that I think that they are doing this really exciting work to reimagine, you know, anthropology and also kind of human scientific inquiry more broadly through chemicals, through porous bodies, through molecular ethnography is like there's so much interesting stuff happening and important stuff because, you know, they're tackling these, these really difficult, sometimes tragic, tragic issues about the bad forms of toxicity and the what is it, body burdens. That's the body burden, body burden of like accumulated toxins.

Speaker1: [00:06:31] So I thought of another you asked me if I had a toxic story and I just I just

Speaker2: [00:06:36] Thought of, OK, let's do your toxic story

Speaker1: [00:06:38] Bike riding in around the town, probably now a city of Watsonville, which is an agricultural region, agricultural community. And they grow a lot of good stuff around there, including tons of strawberries. So I was out riding my bike. I think I was a teenager with my dad and we were next to these fields of strawberries and being a little bit of a thief. He always like to stop and sample the goods right because you're riding along and it's hot and you're tired, and there's all these juicy strawberries right there at your feet. And so we would stop and, you know, grab a handful and eat the strawberries on the way. So then we're doing that and then we hear this like low rumble coming up over the hedges. And sure enough, it's a crop duster. Oh, man, that just dumps all its chemical shit all over us. It sprays the whole field and us on top of it. Wow. And I mean, I wouldn't say that we were soaked, but you could feel the the spray on you. Oh God. And then, you know, you have to ride home like that and you wonder how much you're absorbing or how much got in your nasal passages.

Speaker2: [00:07:46] Or you should have hit the ground like in Cary Grant in north by northwest.

Speaker1: [00:07:50] That would have been cool. I don't know if I didn't think of it or if it all just happened too fast or if it was just a state of shock you.

Speaker2: [00:07:58] You're so gluttonous, indulging yourself with those strawberries.

Speaker1: [00:08:01] And then and then it gave a whole different valence to the strawberries, too, because you're like, Oh yeah, I mean, not that we didn't think they were organic, necessarily, but it's also like, I just ate a bunch of this stuff that's probably been coating these strawberries. You know, they probably been doing this every week for months. I just ate a bunch of them, and now I've been sprayed with that, that pesticide. Now I lived to tell

Speaker2: [00:08:24] You, did live to tell. But I mean, obviously, and this is not to suggest anything bad as a waiting, but I mean, the problem is sometimes that these acute kind of encounters with pesticides, they don't show up again until years later. Yes, that sounds rather ominous.

Speaker1: [00:08:39] I hope not. That sounds like a threat.

Speaker2: [00:08:41] Well, not not my threat, just the threat of patriarchy. Dive bombing you with toxins from the sky?

Speaker1: [00:08:46] Totally. Yeah. Yeah, it was a cute little plane, anyway.

Speaker2: [00:08:49] So with that, shall we turn or shall we turn to the chemical turn?

Speaker1: [00:08:53] We should turn to the chemical term, let's say.

Speaker2: [00:08:55] Go, Vanessa. Welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast, everyone. We have Vanessa Edgar-Jones with us in the studio today here underneath Rice's campus, down in the bunker. But, you know, we were so pleased to have you here. Thanks so much. You just gave a terrific talk in the anthropology department and we're telling us about your fascinating new work. I'm handing it over to my co-host to take us on the voyage of discovery.

Speaker1: [00:09:30] Well, we learned quite a bit about a chemical substance called Clarke Coat Claudia Kotaku Cortisone, which has all kinds of other pet names that are given by the chemical industry

Speaker2: [00:09:42] Like poison

Speaker1: [00:09:46] By some. I don't think they call it that, but I mean, we got this really kind of disturbing but important history about some of the chemical industry here in the United States and how its chemical effects spread to other parts of the world, including a part of the world where you've been doing a lot of intensive ethnographic work. And that is Martinique. That's right. And so I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about how you got interested in this question and how you came to work in Martinique, how the how the kind of chemical kinesthetic came into focus for you or. Sure. The origin stories of of this this work.

Speaker3: [00:10:21] Thanks so much for having me here. It really is a joy and a pleasure to be with you and to be with all your listeners. But there are so many origin stories that I could tell for this project, but perhaps the best way to do so would be via a small kind of ethnographic nugget is to talk about a person who I didn't reference in my talk his name. I've been calling him under his pseudonym. Crozier was a person that I became very close to in Martinique starting in 2008, and over the course of many years, Roget and I volunteered for the same weekly drop in at an organization for so-called vulnerable populations. So as an organization for LGBT people, sex workers and HIV positive people, Crozier was this incredibly active person on the island. He rode his bike around the perimeter of the island on a bicycle tour that happens each year, just something that I could never do. But he was someone who was just incredibly vibrant. He was co-infected with HIV and Hep C, which was thought of as a kind of chronic condition at the time on the island. It wasn't a spectacular problem. He was subject to all of the protections of the French state because Martinique is a part of France. And so he had great health care. He had great medical attention. But Crozier died unexpectedly toward the end of my time in the field and I'd come back to the island and I was talking with someone who also knew him and who loved him. And I asked him, You know what in the world happened? This is a man who rode his bike around the perimeter of the island and in the heat of someone who was incredibly healthy and fit.

Speaker3: [00:12:06] And, you know, you know, took his his, you know, his retroviral, his antiretrovirals with a kind of precision that made doctors swoon. And the person who I was talking to said, You know, Vanessa, you have to really grapple with the fact that Martinique is toxic and the toxicity he was trying to think about was that once about, you know, a kind of social toxicity that he wanted me to think about, about colonialism, about the conditions of life for people who live kind of on the margins of empire and on the margins of Europe in this case, but also material. And in part, he was referencing this chemical chloroquine, which was a pesticide that was used on Martinique banana plantations from 1972 to 1993. There are lots of anxieties on the island about the ongoing effects of chloroquine exposure for people who are otherwise quote-unquote healthy or as healthy as we could be given our late industrial entanglements with all kinds of things. So I came to chloroquine in part by through my attempts at trying to understand what life was like on the island for same sex desiring and gender transgressing people. And in part by happenstance and by chance. And in part because this is a critical part of the constitution of the place where I work. I got to know this chemical that was first produced in the U.S. and is now kind of forever in the soils and in the bodies and the bodies of land and bodies of water, of millions of people in the global south. Right.

Speaker2: [00:13:42] And and it's known in the U.S. as keepon. That's right. That's right. And it was it was first produced in Virginia. Maybe you want to tell us a little bit about it because there's there's another tragedy that also links to the U.S. Sure, part of the kinship you were talking about was this this connection to other places that have been exposed to intense quantities of this chemical over time?

Speaker3: [00:14:05] Thank you. So the chemical was first produced here in the U.S. in the 1950s. It was brought to market by a group called Allied Chemical Company, and this is kind of in the wake of World War Two. This is the rise of kind of post-military use chemical production in the U.S., and it's produced in, for the most part in Delaware, Pennsylvania and principally in Virginia, at a at a factory in Hopewell, Virginia. And then in 1975, there's a spill in the James River, where a number of workers are exposed at very, very high doses to this chemical. And the James is contaminated by keepon, so coupon becomes clear taken when translated into French if either of you punk music fans. Yeah, sure.

Speaker2: [00:14:53] Yeah, we've talked a little about our punk or punk.

Speaker1: [00:14:57] There's some punk listeners out there like punk listeners.

Speaker3: [00:15:00] So there's a there is a song called Coupon Factory by Oh goodness, now I'm forgetting you'll have. I wish this was a college show. Right? Yeah. There's a coupon factory by a group. There's a group out of Virginia called the coupons that are, you know, referencing the spill and the kind of public outcry over over this kind of this contamination. So what happens is after this spill into the James, the U.S. starts regulating this chemical very stringently and decides it can no longer be brought to market. Western Europe starts regulating this chemical very stringently. And the company that that was producing at Allied Chemical takes it takes the chemical off of the market and buy a series of really nasty twists and turns. It ends up back on the market in Martinique later in that decade, in the late 1970s. And this has to do in large part with a group of economic interests on the island banana plantation owners who understand the chemical to be very important to their agricultural industries future and who make plans deliberate plans to bring it back into circulation under the. And with the blessing, unfortunately, of the French state, kind of. Even after this chemical had been regulated elsewhere in the global north, Martinique becomes subject to a kind of regime of exception in the Caribbean and Paris. Parisian regulatory agencies allow it to be recirculated, produced and circulated there.

Speaker1: [00:16:40] Oh, go ahead.

Speaker2: [00:16:41] No, I was just going to ask. I mean, this is seems like a really crucial moment in the story. You're telling how it was brought on the market again. And I just wondered if in any of the historical research you've been able to figure out whether it was just simply a sense of of kind of, you know, global north, global south racism, which we've seen many cases of, of things being taken off the market and Europe in the United States and being sold elsewhere or whether there was anything special. Was there any kind of collusion involved or was there any trickery and deception involved in how this happened or.

Speaker3: [00:17:11] That's a great question. I haven't been able to find much by way of documentation of deception, which is part of what makes this story so shocking. Like, it was very clear that this chemical was dangerous. Kind of like DDT for your listeners who are familiar with other compounds of this nature noxious. It was clearly a carcinogen at that point. There was already indications that this was an endocrine disruptor. We knew that this chemical did not break down naturally in the environment. Quickly, it would take 250 to 600 years. Some people posit for it to break down. And when the economic interest in Martinique kind of made their plans to bring this chemical back to the island, they created a new formulation of this chemical. They explicitly listed Keepon or Cohn as the active ingredient and got permission from Paris to use it. So it could have been a question of oversight in some of the reports that have come out in the wake of the breaking of this scandal. There's some indication that, you know, price and regulatory authorities just weren't paying attention in the way they might have and other to other parts of the the kind of the French territory

Speaker1: [00:18:23] Because they were careful to be sure that it wasn't being used

Speaker3: [00:18:26] And the motherland in metropolitan France, right? But elsewhere, the the the the regulations are more lax. But there's also a very powerful lobbying group in Paris from the economic interests in Martinique. They call it the big banana lobby. So Big K is a term used to describe the descendants of the first slave holding family, the first colonists on the island who still remain the economic elite, and they they pay a staff in Paris to advocate for their interests in cases like this one. And so I'm still learning more. About what the lobbyists did in 1981, when they secured authorization to use this chemical in Martinique. But it's clear that police and regulatory authorities did give them that authorization without deception or trickery with full knowledge that this was

Speaker2: [00:19:22] Like it's not all that surprising. It just just was trying to clarify.

Speaker1: [00:19:26] Yeah. I mean, sadly, it's it's a story that we know in different forms through since colonial times. Right? Unfortunately, it gets me thinking to, you know, your particular case about the kind of potential injury of certain crop production. And I may be wrong about this, but my understanding is that bananas are particularly pesticide insecticide intensive. They require a lot of shit to take care of the critters that get on them and in them, and to keep the crops going. Right? And and so there are kind of an almost like a volatile kind of crop. So I'm wondering if if that's something that you've been thinking about the particularity of of bananas as industrial agriculture that happened not through accident, but to take shape in Martinique, right? And I don't know if there are any parallel crops that that are also being used for export. I mean, you mentioned, I think sweet potatoes are yams. So I wonder, are there are there kind of parallel stories or contrasting stories? If we kind of if we take the banana as part of the faultless culprits in some ways, right?

Speaker3: [00:20:41] Yeah, it's a great question, Simone. And I think here's what I can say in response. Bananas become the dominant export crop in Martinique after the collapse of the sugar industry. So and kind of what happens is that Becky landholders convert much of their arable land from sugar, from cane to bananas. The banana industry in Martinique is also a kind of unique beast in that it's subject to a, you know, a kind of an apparatus of protection because it's a European market. So a kind of protected European market for Martinique and bananas. So it's hard to say that they're there are not really any other crops that are prepared for export from the island. I'll say that there are some things moved from the island. Elsewhere, rum still does move right. Sugar cane not as much yams are exported from the island, but not at the level that you would see kind of banana export. And so and part of what Simone is referencing readers at home, our listeners at home is a moment in 2002 when the Bureau of Consumer Affairs in France accepts a shipment of yams from Martinique, but then incinerates them upon arrival at the Port of Dunkirk in northwestern France because they're determined to contain excessive levels of this pesticide. But yes, bananas are a dirty crop and in scare quotes, Cavendish bananas are a dirty crop, right? So the desire to grow a particular kind of banana that requires a particular kind of intensive kind of monitoring, if not chemical intervention has given rise to a problem like the one we see in Martinique. But Cavendish is not the only banana, right? There are lots of bananas that could be grown.

Speaker1: [00:22:44] The difference what we see in the United States is

Speaker3: [00:22:46] There again are Cavendish bananas, the big kind of big yellow guys, right? As opposed to the small kind of looking like kind of five digits of a finger kind of, you know, which are nicer bananas in general,

Speaker1: [00:22:58] Have a lot in Central America. Those are delicious, right? But they're very different

Speaker3: [00:23:02] And they don't transport well and they don't transport well. Right? You can't put them on a shipping container in the same way that you can. The Cavendish, because it's got a thicker skin. Yeah, it survives the journey

Speaker1: [00:23:14] At different times of the industrial transport. Exactly. I mean, I think the other interesting thing about this case of of the yams that that got burned in France because they had too much chemical quotient to be eaten in France is that it gives a whole new dimension to this concept of eating locally. Yeah, right. So I mean, this has been trotted out for years now as a kind of environmentally friendly way to do things. And I think in some senses it is depending on where you live and depending on the soil. Sure. In the place where you're harvesting those crops, sure. But it makes you want to think twice about, you know, what it means to say that in in certain parts of the world or even certain parts of this country, you know that it's not a kind of pre given that that eating locally is necessarily going to be more helpful for you or the environment, right? Both.

Speaker3: [00:24:04] Right. Absolutely, and I think the other kind of dimension of the question of eating locally, you know, Moji local in Creole has always been an invocation that independence minded kind of actors put on the table for Martinique. And so even though Martinique is a part of an integrated part of France sovereignty, political sovereignty is not on the table. Eating local is one way of maintaining a certain kind of sense of independence from the French state. And one of the people who broke the scandal about Claude Cohen in the press is a writer and theorist and intellectual named Cafe El. And he and I were in his office one day a couple of years ago, and he said something really kind of poignant and important. And he said, You know, Vanessa, I think that this is the first time that a chemical has killed a political idea. He said we can no longer articulate a claim for independence. Granted, he's on a political fringe. There are very few people claiming that independence is where Martinique should go. But you know, this has been long been his political stance, he says. We can no longer articulate a claim for independence because we can't eat right there. Food sovereignty is off the

Speaker1: [00:25:19] Table, including from the sea, because including shellfish and fish has been contaminated too.

Speaker3: [00:25:24] Right? And so a chemical killing a political idea for him, you know? You know, chloroquine has really functioned in our social world that way. And similarly, I mean, but there are people who are doing really interesting work on the island. There is a fantastic farmer activist named Jihad Sahara's, who runs a an organic market where he's trying to teach people a range of things from kind of trying to think about what would it mean to garden hydroponically in kitchen gardens? How do you get access to clean water so that you know, you might, you can't. You can't grow hydroponically at the scale of a population. But how do we give people resources to try to think about eating locally in such a way that we might avoid excessive exposures to Claudia Cohen? I think every you know, most people on the island are fairly well aware that exposure is kind of inevitable, but how do we kind of minimize those exposures? But again, as you said before, sorry, it's it's not a given. It cannot be taken for granted that eating locally is the progressive, radical kind of future oriented project that it might be in other places. Right?

Speaker1: [00:26:38] Right.

Speaker2: [00:26:39] Well, it's interesting to to know that people are trying to think about how to re-appropriate or reimagine agriculture. Right? Because I think that's something you see happening in in very toxic, often urban environments, you know, including in the global north. I'm thinking of Detroit, I'm even thinking of Houston. You know, you know, how do you take places that have obviously have this long history and are essentially brownfields and imagine are there ways you can grow locally there? So I don't know. I mean, that's maybe I'm being too optimistic that there's a way that that that movement could also take shape. But I guess I wanted to ask, are they still growing bananas? Is there anything being exported from Martinique? And if so, where is it going?

Speaker3: [00:27:19] Yeah, so bananas are still big business in Martinique. So the thing about Claudia Cohen was that it was a pesticide that was said to work on the root and not the fruit. And so the bananas themselves very rarely have become the subject of intensive regulation because they don't exhibit kind of much pesticide contamination as they move from the island elsewhere to largely European Union markets. I have spent some time working with people who were once those who were spraying the pesticide who are now using non-chemical kind of insect trapping methods. And so there are pheromone traps that are being used on some plantations now to to try to stem the tide of the banana borer weevil. So these are much less efficient, according to the growers methods of dealing with insect problems, so they require more workers they require. I mean, it's truly a process in which people are trapping insects, live insects that are then having to be destroyed or that is part of their protocol. Having to be, as you know, is something up for up for debate. Sure. But bananas are still big business on the island, for sure. And there are other chemical compounds that are in use now that are illegal, that there are a variety of campaigns where people are claiming that these should be subject to re-evaluation as well. So now it's fungicides that are that are the target and the problem that many people are concerned about. Not in a not now, but in addition to Claudia Cohen, there's been aerial spraying to try to counteract. Something called the circle poison or black something fungus that has also been attacking banana plants.

Speaker1: [00:29:16] I mean, maybe this sounds sort of predictable, but it's kind of like in the same way we talk about paying the actual price for oil, gasoline and, you know, sort of accounting for and actually monetizing the externalities that it's involved with and the kind of transportation it involves the kind of labor and, you know, extractive industry that involves. And we know that conversation. But of course, that same conversation can be had about something like bananas. Sure, right? Because bananas are really fucking cheap, right? I mean, if you go to a regular grocery store here in the United States, you can get a pound of bananas for 59 cents conventionally grown. Yeah, that's dirt cheap. Yeah. I mean, you know, they're like potatoes or something. And yet they're coming from quite far away. They require a lot of intensive care, you know, to to be able to thrive as a plant. Hmm. Mm hmm. They require a lot of labor and shipping, so we're certainly not paying the actual price. But people in places where they're being grown are absolutely so.

Speaker3: [00:30:15] And what would happen if built into that price was the care for not only the workers, but the communities that are exposed to, you know, the banana plantations inputs as well?

Speaker1: [00:30:25] I mean, you know, I don't want to sound righteous, but like, you know what, if we paid, you know, something more like eight or ten dollars a pound for bananas, so we eat a few less bananas. I mean, it's it becomes, I don't know. Again, there's something volatile about particular crops, right, that can be difficult to ship, difficult to care for and therefore very expensive in real terms.

Speaker3: [00:30:46] Absolutely.

Speaker2: [00:30:48] So, yeah, OK, go ahead. Well, I was just going to not exactly change gears, but but as you know, we've got this fascinating, tragic story is all too often the beginning of an anthropological research project of some kind. Just a comment. You know, you have to understand Martinique is toxic. Yeah, but I got the feeling that as you got into this project, you also were really interested in this conceptually, like what does it mean to study a chemical or chemical agent? What does that teach us about environments and bodies and and and feelings? So I'm just going to invite you to talk a little bit about that dimension of the project. In other words, we've heard maybe a little bit through our other job as as journal editors, people thinking about a kind of chemical turn, let's say, in the human sciences these days, and you're obviously a part of that. So and you're the first person we've had on the podcast, you can talk about it. So we'd love to hear some of your thoughts.

Speaker3: [00:31:47] Ok, most interesting. I guess I am, I sure. I mean, I think in some ways, other people being at the forefront of that chemical turn, but they're OK. I am. I am part of it. You know, part of what I've been interested in and this has to do with the kind of training I had is in being able to tell a story about the social world that takes the concerns of what some people call the old materialist. Seriously, the kind of how do we think about commodity chains and political economy and and ask questions about labor, but also take the concerns of what the so-called new materialists are interested in seriously, like the Sensorium and how do we think, you know, at the at the at the level of what I've been interested in is the kinesthetic about the social world. So to kind of think across scale in in deliberate ways. And I think anthropologists do that exceedingly well in most cases. But I'm wondering what taking a chemical and tracking the movement of that chemical from the scale of the body to the scale, you know, from the trans corporeal scale between the body and and social worlds around it to the transnational what that can tell us about the contemporary moment.

Speaker3: [00:33:03] So one of the things I was sharing today was a little bit about my my, my thinking about chemicals and bodies and how people track the sense of a chemical in their own bodies. And I've been trying to work on this word play that I've been calling chemical anesthesia, Ken Backslash anaesthesia. So thinking about a kinesthetic awareness of chemicals and bodies as something that might have something to contribute to scientific formulations of body burden and the and and trying to understand too, how. People's awareness of their own exposures might, can does contribute to their articulations of kinship with those with similar kinds of exposures. So communities of chemical injury and how those work across scale, right? So on Martinique, there are people articulating certain kinds of kinship based upon exposure. And how do we think about those kinship ups beyond the scale of the national or the not national for Martinique, the territorial to other places? So from the site of production to the site of consumption or multiple sites of consumption? In what ways can we tell stories that help us? You know, again, work from the local into the global. Hmm. Right?

Speaker1: [00:34:25] Yeah. One of the interesting kinship stories that we heard, too, is that the Makei claim a kind of kinship of of injury of kind of chemical injury with the rest of the Martinique who share the island with because of this exposure. Absolutely. So it becomes this really, I don't know, sort of retrograde feeling about kinship. Yeah, right. That's based on toxicity. Right?

Speaker3: [00:34:51] In many ways, right? And kind of cynical deployment of kinship as a tool to secure their absolution, perhaps as a tool to kind of evade accountability.

Speaker2: [00:35:02] Even though I'm sorry to interrupt, even though this all happened recently enough that I imagine some of the same people who made the decision to bring this to bring the pesticide down into Martinique are still alive, probably so they are actually real. There would be a real opportunity to hold people accountable.

Speaker1: [00:35:20] Absolutely. Yeah, that's true. And some of them are are living with the with the chemical right. They're living with it, right? I wanted to also think about one of the ways that you've been talking about the permeability of bodies. So one of the conversations that's been ongoing in the human sciences is the question of the relationship between human beings and non-human beings. And I noticed that I think that you prefer the term human bodies and non-human bodies. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about, you know, what's the background behind that choice or if you switch back and forth, maybe between the two? I guess what is for you? What is the difference between being and body? And is there something important that chemicals have to do with bodies that might be different than beings?

Speaker3: [00:36:15] That is a fantastic question. Hmm. I'm not sure that I am. Ready to answer it, but I I I guess I will say. But for me, I have been less concerned with getting at the interiority of being than I have been about the interiority of the body. And that is. In part, I think this was in part because the. The scholarship on Martinique tends to overemphasize a kind of crisis of being the way to get at. For many of my colleagues historically and in the present, the way to get at the problem of this non-sovereign place is to get at interiority being a kind of. A kind of primary struggle for identity and consciousness and ability to be in the world at the colonial project makes difficult and that transatlantic slavery makes difficult and that right. And part of what I've been trying to do in my work is to tack a bit away from that particular conversation to something about from being to body to to something that is perhaps more material. And I think in some ways, I hope it's an approach to the questions on the island. That I don't know how to say this gently. I don't want. I'm like, I I wouldn't want to pretend to be able to access being right. So I think there's a there's a certain kind of anthropological kind of conceit that we can access certain kinds of understandings about being for others. And I think being is a hard one, right? And I and I I think what I can access in my work is body and I can talk with people about bodies and embodiment and kind of what makes up that process for them. I can also kind of go with them to have body burden tests and we can talk about, you know, how their bodies move in the world and what it feels like to be in their body. But the kind of existential question of being something that I feel less convinced that ethnography can tackle, I'm happy to be proven wrong, but I've been less convinced by some of the arguments about what we can do ethnographic only to really chart fully

Speaker1: [00:38:58] Being yeah, for sure. And and the kinesthetic is is such an appropriate and logical approach for for what you're trying to investigate, right? And it shows up in bodies, right? Even this concept of body burden, which which I guess is a kind of medical term in terms of sort of the percentage of of toxic or other chemicals that you have in your flesh and your blood.

Speaker3: [00:39:20] Right, right. It's a toxicological term that moves into the medical establishment. It's been used for about the past 50 years, mostly in the Anglophone world. So there's there's an interesting way in which there's not quite a French correlate. But the idea is that this is how we measure accumulated amount of harm and harm has conventionally been measured by material substances like mercury, like lead like DDT, like Claudia Cohn. But these emergent kind of conversations about how, for example, stress cortisol exposure to cortisol might cause enduring harm or emergent conversations about the social determinants of health. Those kinds of questions, I think, could productively be integrated into a concept of body burden. So body burden, not just the things we can document in our blood urine kind of test, right? How else might we think these burdens and how else might we give voice to them? And I think the kinesthetic for me is one way of getting at how people sense a burden and how that really does become manifest in a way in consequences like, for example, Crozier's early death right there. There are. There are there are conditions of burden that are not easily articulable in medical terms, but that are articulable in other terms. And so I'm interested in stretching the definition of body burden, which is why I chose it as the title of the book that I'm writing. It is really about trying to think about all of the things a body might bear, including things like pesticide exposure and and the like.

Speaker2: [00:41:05] Yeah, do you see? I mean, because obviously in Martinique, you're looking at a post or not even post plantation society, right? You know, but but shaped by the entire history of the plantations of the new world and those, you know, racial dynamics, those class dynamics, those gender dynamics and in many others. And I'm just wondering when we're talking about like the feeling of burden here. To what extent do you see? Is there a chemical turn there? Or is it really just another sedimentary layer upon the same edifice right that we've been seeing for centuries that's been built? And the reason I asked that is just because another sense in which you were talking about chemical kinship in the sense of a community of injury. You know, and it can be taken in different directions. And I loved how you were. You were very subtle in terms of saying some claims to community are more valid than others in this context. But when you were comparing the victims of the spill in Virginia to the experience of the people living in the toxic plume of Martinique, I felt there is how you're making a move towards, well, maybe there is a way in which this kinship idiom can do something important in which, you know, ironically, strangely, the experience of exposure and violence, honestly, that has been experienced in plantation societies in the Caribbean also is weirdly linked to something happening in Virginia. Absolutely. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if there's something there or not.

Speaker3: [00:42:36] There is absolutely. And it's part of what I mean, the way that the scandal breaks again in Martinique, there's the incineration of these sweet potatoes that causes a bit of a an uproar. But there's these two academics who are not scientists who are not. We're not even social scientists, a lawyer and a literary theorist, slash critic slash public intellectual. They happen to be fluent in English, and so they're able to read the documents on coupon from the spill in Virginia. And they write this book, called Chronicle of a Poisoning, foretold in 2008 that circulates in Martinique, Huntington and Poznan, announced by Rafael Coffey and Louis bootROM. And part of what's so striking to me about this book is kind of like the equivalent of Silent Spring in the U.S., right? It's kind of Rachel Carson narrative kind of thing. It does the same kind of narrative work. But what's so striking about it to me still is that this the book was only possible because these two academics had a particular level of English capacity. They were able to kind of read all of these reports about this chemical and realize it was the same one that was circulating in Martinique and they were able to kind of. Make that first connection, and to me, like this kind of kinship between Hopewell and for defense is something that could very usefully be plumbed. You know, I'm not a resident of Hopewell, nor am I a resident of Fort de France or any other part of Martinique. But I see that kinship as one that's really kind of pregnant with possibility in terms of how you might think of alliance by exposure and how you might actually consider a kind, a kind of accountability that doesn't end at a territory's boundaries, a kind of accountability that forces us to rethink the movement of these substances in social worlds that are not just local, but that really do take us to multiple places around the globe.

Speaker3: [00:44:37] I think the other part of your question made me think about I've been reading Claudia Rankin's work quite a lot, who I very much appreciate, and she has this line in Citizen that says yes and the body has memory. The physical carriage carries more than its weight. And so you asked if this is about segmenting right of kind of these processes over time or if this really is a chemical turn? I think it's both. I think it's about a kind of body memory that I'm very interested in charting and about how the physical carriage, as Claudia says, carries kind of both the weight of the life its lived and the the weight of its exposures to the life its continuing to forge in the environments around it. So, yes, both chemical and sediment. The book that I'm writing is in three parts. Sand, soil and sediment. And I'm and I think that geologists think it really interesting ways about accretion and about how bodies of land tell a story and kind of stratigraphic layers of rock. Tell us a story. People like Kim, Fortune and others have been making, you know, really great arguments about how we might look to geology to think about history and anthropology. I think we might look to geology, too, for thinking about bodies of people and not just bodies of land and bodies of water and soil and sediment, you know, kind of helps me do some of that work.

Speaker1: [00:46:03] Yeah, since you brought up Kim Fortune, I mean, she's sort of been on my mind too and thinking about toxicity. Right. Because I mean, she's written very explicitly about lead industrialism and the need to recognize that we live in toxic plumes. Toxic conditions, toxic stratigraphy is right. And to be careful about what she calls the Latour effect, right, where we're just sort of thinking about adjunctive acts that are, you know, sort of making moves in the world, you know, whether they're whether they're human or non-human, but they they don't exactly operate in a context. They're networked and connected. And there's there's activity and action. Sure. But it doesn't allow for the kind of toxicities that that you're thinking about and writing about in other people are are also joining you in that. Yeah. I wonder, you know, we talked a little bit about the Anthropocene. Big quote marks around that earlier and and you, you know, made the important point that it's important as we're thinking about Anthropocene, whether we like that term or not, that it not become a kind of ruse for flattening out all humanity. To say that we all, you know, sort of live in the same conditions or have the same sort of responsibilities. I think that's important. But the question I wanted to ask was whether you feel like, you know, if we want to call it Anthropocene or whatever we call it, these sort of heightened conditions of of ecological or environmental awareness, do you think that there is more space now to kind of take into account these toxicities? Do you think there's more space for people to to think with chemicals in ways that they might not have before? Is there an opening there or is there a kind of conjunction that can happen in the sort of eco attainments and these chemo attainments?

Speaker3: [00:47:55] I don't know. Sure. That's a great question. I think there's an opening, but also there's an opening, a limit and a danger, perhaps, is what I'll say. And I think the opening is clearly there. The eco attunement that I think that's a beautiful phrase. I think there are lots of people trying to think about these late industrial entanglements Kim Wright, Fortune, Michelle Murphy and others. The limit, I think, is that we have. I think many of us have a limited amount of bandwidth for trying to take on board all of the different kinds of entanglements that we are working with, and so one of the ways that I think body burden is interesting is that you can get mercury in the same basket as something like cortisol like, you know, kind of ongoing exposure to fight or flight hormones, right? So I think it's hard to think about all these things at once. So that's the opportunity, the limit and the danger is that, you know, even projects like my own. I want to focus on a single chemical to do this thinking, but it falls into the trap of being thought of, perhaps as unique when really it is. And it's just one of so many with which we are traveling and that we need to try to understand, not singularly, but as interacting substances. Yet our bandwidth often only allows us to think with one or think with two rather than with this kind of

Speaker1: [00:49:26] Because even the one and the two are already a massive amount. Right, right. History and information and, you know, chemical understanding. And there's already a lot. Right.

Speaker2: [00:49:36] So that's why I found your phrase molecular ethnography so exciting. I think that's a great way to think about it, you know, as not as something to replace. Maybe the more conventional types of ethnography that we do, but as a really important supplement. Yeah, to that. And maybe a way that you can rethink. And I don't know why this popped into my head. But when we had Jeff VanderMeer, the speculative writer and Sci-Fi writer on the podcast, he was talking about when he really wanted to design like a virtual reality headset that let you see like chemical trails. He had this whole idea. I was just like, That would be such a great project just because because part of it is the invisibility, which I think also cuts across the sense of embodiment. And so when people say they feel it within themselves, not to doubt that. But I mean, it's kind of that's the level at which you can grasp it. Is it in its internalization? Or maybe it smell in some cases, but a lot of times there's the sense that the chemical world is kind of colorless, odorless beyond what our senses are kind of adapted to yield information about smell. So it does become like particularly challenging as an anthropologist to go after that? Absolutely. I don't know.

Speaker3: [00:50:46] Absolutely. I think part of what I've tried to do is to be, you know, I was very lucky to have studied with Jose Munoz as a graduate student. He was one of my first teachers and queer theory, and he has all he always did ask us to think about the level of the gesture, and I think that is something that anthropologists have sometimes been great at and sometimes been not so great at. But I think the gesture, the small movement, the the the kind of the fine, I don't know the the fine indicators of embodiment are some of the things I've tried to pay attention to and that is what is pointed me towards the sense of the molecule in the body. So even, you know, talking to someone about her sensing of Claudia on her body and think and watching her kind of touch her body in particular ways Made Me has made me pay attention to the stories that she tells right after right. So the kind of at the level of the gesture, how do people represent their sense of exposure and their sense of entanglement because they can't get inside of it, right? So that's been of interest to me as this.

Speaker2: [00:52:02] Has this work made you more generally interested in the kind of conversations about environmental justice and remediation of toxic environments, which I think is, you know, again, you mentioned Silent Spring. I mean, that was one of the landmark moments in the making of a modern environmental movement, right? And I think that, you know, shout out to our at Texas Southern here, you know, Dr. Robert Bullard has done this really good work, just just based here in Houston. But I mean, these toxic environments, I feel like, you know, somehow something about the kind of recognition of the Anthropocene is bringing these more generally back into peoples into the into our front stage again, somehow. And so I don't know if you know, have you been thinking past Martinique to and more generally, is that an interest or

Speaker3: [00:52:49] I'm very hopeful that this is what's happening. I'm not sure that I'm seeing it in the way that I would like to, but I'm very hopeful that that's what's afoot. I am. I did a I staged a conference last year called Toxic, a symposium on exposure, entanglement and endurance. You can still find all the documentation from the conference at Toxic Symposium Dawg. And in that set of conversations, we spent a lot of time engaging the work of a photographer named Latoya Ruby Frazier, who's documented the the kind of the quote unquote decline. I won't necessarily call it a decline of her community of Brad. Pennsylvania, it was a site of, you know, for for U.S. Steel, I believe, but also has been a site that has lost its, you know, they lost their regional hospital as a site that was subjected to intensive policing. She's trying to think about kind of social decline and industrial decline, as well as kind of material and social toxicity. And part of what was so exciting about toxic was getting to think with people who are both in the academy and outside of it about these questions of environmental justice that were not only focused on the U.S., but thinking them in a global frame. So using LeToya as work, which was it's very local, it's very much about Braddock to begin our conversations about how E.J. environmental justice as a kind of set of, you know, Dr. Bullard. Thank you so much for the work you've been doing for so long. If you're out there listening, I am so grateful. Please do. And I would love to meet him someday. I hope you know, and others have been, you know, pushing the question very clearly here in the U.S. and I'm curious about how this question arises and emerges in conversation with what's happening elsewhere in the world. I'm not sure if that that that answered your question dominate.

Speaker2: [00:54:47] I feel like things like Flint, like the thing in Flint with the water, are just things that have drawn national and international attention. Sure. You know, totally deservedly. But you know, when you begin then to think about, it's really such a big issue. So many sites are affected, so many communities, individuals or part of that hemisphere. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:55:09] Well, I think, you know, something like Flint when it finally makes the news after far too long draws a lot of national attention. But environmental justice movements have been going on in the United States and elsewhere for a long time. And in some ways, it kind of matters where you're located, right? Because my colleague at American University was doing environmental justice, work with people, you know, living in marginalized, economically marginal communities in Washington, DC for decades, right? And there was no question about toxicity there. And then it's just that it wasn't part of a larger national conversation, but it was a big part of the conversation in those communities, right? Right. So some of it has to do with where where we have a be right. What we're tuned into

Speaker3: [00:55:54] And how we can link. Hopefully those conversations up across national boundaries, right? So if Hopewell can get linked up with Ford or France or whatever's happening in D.C., you can get linked up with, you know, other struggles elsewhere. I think we have the potential to ask different kind of questions about justice and to think about our futures in different frames. I think that's a critical part of the work that we need to do now.

Speaker2: [00:56:22] I had I had one more question to you.

Speaker1: [00:56:24] I do, too. Yeah. Ok, go forward. Ok. This is kind of the question that. And it's not. I don't even know if it's a question. It's just kind of a proposition to throw out. Sure. And this is the thing that I was bringing up in the seminar to its thinking about these different kinds of chemicals and their their excess of exposure. Mm hmm. So in the case of of Martinique, we have kind of ambient exposure of people to to Claudia Cohn and it and it's toxicities and there's all these effects. And then I was mentioning the work of this other anthropologist who has been doing work on the FEMA trailers and their emissions of formaldehyde and how that has had toxic effects on people who basically were forced to live in those those containers, right? Or the housing units. I guess they were called Nick Shapiro. Nick Shapiro. Yes, exactly. And yeah, and the chemical sublime. Right. And so that's that kind of gestural thing to like tuning into those those subtleties. And then I also mentioned, I mean, this is just anthropological work, but I think you could find this, you know, in the media and news media elsewhere, too.

Speaker1: [00:57:33] But this case of a small community in the southern United States, where there's a lot of meth amphetamine manufacture, so people are working with it as a source of income. And some of them are also ingesting it as I don't know, maybe sometimes as a form of recreation, but also as a form of coping in many ways. Right. And then the third example was this question about the opioid crisis that we've been hearing about and the use of those particular substances, which are both pharmaceutical and organic, right? And yet they're incredibly addictive. And so people get exposed to these different chemicals in different ways. There's a different axis of exposure, and I think it's really easy for us to say and this is the easy way. Out just to say like, oh, you know, Martinique, this is a clearly, you know, a diabolical plot somehow on the part of the chemical industry, and I think it probably was in some ways and people were sort of passively exposed to this

Speaker2: [00:58:41] Or the government

Speaker1: [00:58:42] Or the government or both or the Big K or, you know, whoever the agent is there, right? A bunch of them. But then when it comes to, you know, maybe a, let's say, a doctor working in New York City who gets addicted to some kind of painkiller? And then, you know, goes on to follow that addiction. There's no question here, it's just it's kind of a it's just a thinking about exposures. Yeah, and there's in some ways I think blame gets laid in different ways. And yet I think we can say that there's exposure like we're all sort of exposed to these different kinds of chemicals in different ways all the time. And they they sort of rise up, right? They rise up. When we hear about Flint, they rise up when all of a sudden, you know, a bunch of like white kids in middle school and middle America are addicted to heroin all of a sudden. Right. But it's all sort of these different vectors of exposure. So that was just something that your talk really got me thinking about. Like, what are the vectors? And I don't even think it's agency. Mm hmm. Right? You know, I don't necessarily blame these middle schoolers or the doctors. And I definitely don't blame the folks in Martinique, right? But it's like, you know, how do you think about these, these vectors or these points of access?

Speaker3: [01:00:04] Because it sounds like part of what we could be thinking about or should be thinking about or is not exposure and vectors of exposure at the level of individual exposure, but how we get to a point whereby our the people, places and things in our social world are able to be exposed. So the vector that happens temporally historically at a different moment, right? So how does how are these chemicals compounded, synthesized put on the market that makes possible these later kinds of struggles about whether exposure is voluntary or involuntary, or whether a chemical can harm or heal or both, and when we might categorize them as a harming or healing chemical. And maybe the question that we need to ask is about the moment when sorry, at the moment, historically, when we make a certain set of decisions about chemical circulation, synthetic chemical circulation and about the consequences of those decisions, which seem to be very rarely documented, right? You know, part of the part of the anxiety in this moment is that we have thousands and thousands of new chemicals entering the market each year that are not tested for their safety that are not, you know. And this is just in the U.S., right? So we're still in that moment. We're still in that moment that I I just said a moment ago was kind of a story. This was a historical question about when we allowed these chemicals to enter the market. But these synthetic chemicals to kind of be a part of the apparatus, you know, the network of things to which we might be exposed. It's actually still our contemporary moment, right? And we're still not asking the question. We're not calling the question, what are these things? What could the potential ramifications be downstream once we start exposing ourselves to these to these compounds voluntarily or not? Yeah.

Speaker1: [01:02:06] And downstream is a great putting into very eerie, but yeah, appropriate.

Speaker2: [01:02:12] Or you know, what's what, what happens when we start thinking of ourselves, our bodies as chemical technologies of a certain type? And then, you know, what's an ethical ecology, right? You know, what's a balanced what's a sustainable, I guess, just to bring us back to where we started? I was curious to to to to hear you maybe talk a bit about, you know, to what extent you see the chemical turn also as a queer turn as a way and maybe in that same spirit of rethinking. But but has it been that for you? Do you think it, it should be more generally? Is that something that you think that because, you know, we've had this conversation to, particularly with seminars work, she came out of doing work and didn't queer anthropology and has worked on ecology, environment, Anthropocene issues. Now, how to create those activities between that and I think I think you feel that may not speak for you, which I am sorry that you think there is a connection there. Okay.

Speaker1: [01:03:05] It's just the way

Speaker2: [01:03:06] We can help us. We can't help ourselves. It's true. It's true. It's true and it's terrible. But OK, so there you have there are. Having dug myself into that hole, perhaps you'd be so kind as I will take

Speaker3: [01:03:17] You out and I'm like, Here I come out of the shovel. Yeah. You know, I think that's a great question. I think is a tremendously important one. I wish the chemical turn was more of a queer turn, and I think it can be, and I think it should be. And I think it obviously is. And I think, you know, the way I came into this project was in part about anxieties, about environmental estrogens. And this was kind of where Claudia Cohn, in the case of Josie, who you had talked about in the beginning, pops up right? People are concerned not only about at least in Martinique. When I was first doing fieldwork were concerned not only about the material consequences of exposure to a chemical, but the byproducts of that chemical and these things estrogen mimicking hormones. And I think crochets is a lot to teach us about hormones. Because folks in queer studies have been thinking about hormones for a very long time and about the the the the biological constitution, the so-called biological constitution of sex, the kinds of problems with thinking, sex and gender and solely biological terms or in biological terms at all for some. And hormones have a lot to tell us to teach us on that front. So someone you know, my colleagues in trans studies, you know, have a lot to say about chemicals, synthetic chemical compounds that help rather than harm. And how do we but but may also harm? And so how do we think about chemicals that are doing two kinds of work in the same body and particularly synthetic hormones, right? So I think I would hope that queer studies has a lot to say to the chemical turn. I'd hope that my work contributes in some small way to that conversation. But Simone, you passed the baton to you.

Speaker1: [01:05:09] Oh, well, because I mean, I don't know if I I don't know if I can really speak to the chemical turn. Exactly. I mean, other than like a really cursory way. Yeah, but I mean, I think that queer theory and feminist studies has had a lot to say about relationships, for example, between humans and that that can be extended to non-human others, beings and bodies. You know, whatever category we want to put them into and that there's really rich places for rethinking kinship, for example, like you're doing in your work and, you know, a sense of collectivity. Yeah, in many ways. And I mean, queer theory at its best is really trying to upend things and and think things not in an antithetical way, but in a way that allows us to peer through the cracks and see something different anew. At least, you know, in its most abstract but also most powerful sense. And my sense is that that is what we need now and this particular time, and to be able to envision life differently. And, you know, queer thinking, feminist thing has been been doing that and trying to do that for many decades now. So that's a it's a good place to find some roots. Yeah. And we see so many of these important thinkers now, right, are coming out of a feminist background or queer studies background, right? And they don't always get the recognition that they should, although sometimes they do. Yeah, you know, the the goddesses like Derek dona€t or, you know, she's always getting her props. But I think that there's a lot there are a lot of other thinkers out there that are coming out of that tradition that sometimes get erased. And some of our academic conversations. So that's something we have to

Speaker3: [01:06:55] Be aware of. Immediate. Yeah. And I would. Last thing I'll say on that point, sorry, Dominic, is that I was talking to my students last week about toxicity, endocrine disruption. And I think one of the things that became very clear over the course of our conversation was that you cannot think toxicity without thinking about anxieties over sex, gender and reproduction, because that is where the anxieties tend to coalesce in the public sphere. And so, of course, kind of feminist and queer theorists who've been thinking about sex, gender and reproduction and the most kind of groundbreaking ways would be some of the people who have something to say about toxicity, at the very least, and chemical kind of chemical entanglements, the chemical turn more generally. So yes.

Speaker1: [01:07:37] Yeah. Thank you. No. Yeah, great point. Well.

Speaker2: [01:07:42] I will just I mean, I just would sign on to everything that was just said, but to repeat, it might send the wrong message.

Speaker1: [01:07:50] Do some clever comment on chemicals and the quotient of body burden that we have of caffeine among us right now.

Speaker2: [01:07:57] We're doing, what's that? I'm al

Speaker3: [01:08:00] Pellegrino.

Speaker1: [01:08:03] That's no burden.

Speaker2: [01:08:05] It remains only for us to thank you from the depths of our hearts for coming to rice and sharing this amazing work. We're going to be on the lookout for it because that book is coming and we will link to your website for your symposium, which is great. And now that this is out there, we hope that you know, other folks interested in the chemical, the matters chemical will come, come your way and come our way and keep this conversation going. Mm hmm.

Speaker3: [01:08:29] Mm hmm. Thanks so much.

Speaker1: [01:08:31] Yeah. Thank you, Vanessa. Thank you.