Temporalities Archives

Chemical Exposures

Exposure to toxic chemicals has become common place, yet the study of both chemicals and toxicity has tended to remain at the margins of the social sciences. This volume addresses the entangled landscape of toxic chemicals in the Anthropocene, drawing together research by anthropologists, geographers, artists, and scholars in science and technology studies. The contributors understand chemical pollution as not simply pervasive, but multiple, situated and unequal, profoundly relational and affective, traversing temporal and spatial scales as it continuously disrupts and reconfigures the relations between the geological and the human, the political and the material, and between the social and natural sciences and humanities. Chemical Exposures explores the accumulation of toxic substances, the multiple scales of exposure, and the diverse ways in which exposure can be both sensed and visualised.

The Chronopolitics of Life

The Chronopolitics of Life represents an important, timely and novel contribution in the fields of anthropology, social sciences of medicine, science and technology studies and cognate disciplines. By examining the concept of chronopolitics, this interdisciplinary collection explores the coproduction of temporalities, bodies and power relations in health contexts.

The book offers an original perspective on how temporalities shape the embodiment of health-related inequalities, across the beginning and the end of life. It provides empirical examples, from different places in Europe and Africa, of how technoscientific and biomedical endeavours reconfigure the temporalities of life. It also describes how time becomes a resource that is unequally distributed. By investigating health practices and lived experiences in science, institutions and governance, the authors reveal how specific temporal regimes can lead to discrimination on the basis of age, race, gender, (dis)ability and sexual orientation. This differentially shapes the experiences of ill-health, biomedical practices, the governing of bodies, biographies and the life course.

Unmaking to Make

The call to decolonise has become one of the dominant forces in contemporary art – yet its most radical possibilities are routinely absorbed and neutralised by the institutions of the Global North. Unmaking to Make intervenes in this impasse by turning to Latin America, centring Afro-diasporic and Indigenous perspectives from a region where artistic practice operates at the intersection of aesthetics, politics and social life, and whose thinkers and practitioners have long theorised decolonisation from within.

Drawing on essays, curatorial reflections and conversations with contributors from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Martinique, Mexico and Peru, the volume moves across four thematic terrains – counter-genealogies, museums and cultural institutions, the decolonisation of language, and plural temporalities – to show how art unsettles colonial narratives, reshapes knowledge and generates new vocabularies of power.

At its core, the volume makes a bold claim: that Latin American artistic practice is not just transforming the canon but articulating a form of thought – one that theorises, enacts and insists upon other worlds. Essential reading for scholars, curators, artists and students of contemporary art, decolonial thought and Latin American cultural politics.