Nicholas Shapiro, Chemical Heritage Foundation
Chemical Heritage Foundation - Brown Bag Lectures (Philadelphia, PA)
Time: 12:00 to 1:00 p.m.
Location: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 315 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106
Event Type: Open to the Public
Fee: Free
RSVP Online: No Registration Required
In this talk Shapiro will attempt to track the simultaneous composition and decomposition of life through industrial chemistry and American late industrial capitalism, with a particular focus on how our chemical ecologies, infrastructures, atmospheres, and techniques of capital accumulation shift over time: a bundle of linked processes and materials he is tenuously calling “chemo-capital succession.” Stemming from ethnographic work on formaldehyde and its precursor, methane (a potent greenhouse gas), he will query the political implications of remediation, speculative finance as environmental regulator, civic technosciene/consumerist irony, and artist-led “alter-engineering” projects.
Nicholas Shapiro is a Matter, Materials, and Culture Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation and an Open Air Fellow at Public Lab. He is a critic and practitioner of environmental monitoring and mitigation, collaborating across the social science, the natural sciences, and the arts. His field sites span American airspace from the industrialization of the rural atmosphere at sites of hydrocarbon extraction, to chemically conditioned indoor air in manufactured housing, to codeveloping infrastructure for solar balloon travel. He received his doctorate from Oxford University in anthropology in 2014, followed by a postdoc at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Brown Bag Lectures (BBLs) are a series of weekly informal talks on the history of chemistry or related subjects, including the history and social studies of science, technology, and medicine. Based on original research (sometimes still in progress), these talks are given by local scholars for an audience of CHF staff and fellows and interested members of the public.
For more information, please call 215.873.8289 or e-mail bbl@chemheritage.org.