Making Sugar into Oil: Sugarcane Science and the Paradoxes of Renewable Futures in Brazil

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dc.contributor.advisorBallestero, Andreaen_US
dc.contributor.advisorBoyer, Dominicen_US
dc.creatorUlrich, Katieen_US
dc.date.accessioned2024-05-21T21:49:23Zen_US
dc.date.created2024-05en_US
dc.date.issued2024-04-03en_US
dc.date.submittedMay 2024en_US
dc.date.updated2024-05-21T21:49:23Zen_US
dc.descriptionEMBARGO NOTE: This item is embargoed until 2030-05-01en_US
dc.description.abstractAmid fossil-fuel-driven climate change, finding sustainable replacements for everyday fuels and materials made from petroleum—from plastics to synthetic fabrics—has been a pressing concern for decades. Plant-based products, enabled by biotech, are one solution. However, “plant-based” or “bio-based” often generically stand in for ethical and sustainable consumption, while the social and environmental impacts of bioproducts can in fact replicate uneven structures of oppression. This dissertation theorizes such contradictions through studying scientists’ efforts to make biofuels, bioplastics, and other bioproducts from sugarcane in Brazil. If between the 16th and 20th centuries Brazilian sugarcane was located at the nexus of plantation and factory, in the 21st century it is squarely located at the nexus of industrial-agricultural field, flexible factory, and biotech laboratory. Complementing the extensive Brazilian scholarship on present-day sugarcane labor, this dissertation looks at another increasingly important site of sugarcane production: the production of knowledge in the lab. I argue that sugarcane-based renewables often reproduce petro-extractivism under the guise of sustainability, yet scientists’ practices also open other possibilities. This dissertation draws on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork and experimental cataloging methods (what I call a sugar library) in São Paulo, Brazil and California, US. I offer changeways as the dissertation’s key conceptual intervention: changeways are particular stories of broader social change embodied in patterns of practices, relations, materials, and molecules surrounding sugarcane-based bioproducts. Put differently, changeways are genres of socio-material change. Each chapter is guided by a key entry from my sugar library in order to analyze a different changeway: flexible change, substitutive change, generic change, sucro change, and excusive change. The first three tend to reproduce petro-extractivism, despite renewable ideals. When sugarcane is transformed into bioproducts, often another important transformation happens too: petro-capitalism’s culpability in climate crises is alchemically transformed into the idea that capitalism is the only way to solve climate change. However, the latter two changeways offer possibilities within and beyond petro-capitalism through challenging how raw materials are conceived in the first place, and challenging the very instrumentality of scientific knowledge production. In all, changeways name how scientists’ technical practices lay the molecular foundations for various ideologies of change in an era of climate change. The dissertation thus provides concepts for STS, environmental anthropology, and energy humanities around contemporary convergences of natural resource extraction, scientific knowledge production, and social transition.en_US
dc.embargo.lift2030-05-01en_US
dc.embargo.terms2030-05-01en_US
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen_US
dc.identifier.citationUlrich, Katie. Making Sugar into Oil: Sugarcane Science and the Paradoxes of Renewable Futures in Brazil. (2024). PhD diss., Rice University. https://hdl.handle.net/1911/116135en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1911/116135en_US
dc.language.isoengen_US
dc.rightsCopyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.en_US
dc.subjectRenewable energyen_US
dc.subjectclimate changeen_US
dc.subjectsugarcaneen_US
dc.subjectbiofuelsen_US
dc.subjectbioplasticen_US
dc.subjectBrazilen_US
dc.subjectscienceen_US
dc.subjectbiotechen_US
dc.titleMaking Sugar into Oil: Sugarcane Science and the Paradoxes of Renewable Futures in Brazilen_US
dc.typeThesisen_US
dc.type.materialTexten_US
thesis.degree.departmentAnthropologyen_US
thesis.degree.disciplineSocial Sciencesen_US
thesis.degree.grantorRice Universityen_US
thesis.degree.levelDoctoralen_US
thesis.degree.nameDoctor of Philosophyen_US
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