Vienna STS Talks Kim Fortun

Drawing on long-running anthropological research on the lived experience, science, and politics of toxic chemicals, this presentation will explore the dynamics of  today’s “late industrialism.” Beginning in the mid-1980s, marked heuristically by the 1984 Bhopal disaster, late industrialism is characterized by both acute and chronic disaster, emergent from tightly coupled ecological, technological, political, economic, social and cultural systems, many of which are over-extended, fractured by serial retrofitting, and notably difficult to visualize, conceptualize and coordinate response to. Late industrialism is also characterized by over-extended paradigms and disciplines, and incredible imbrication of commercial interest in knowledge production, in legal decisions, in governance at all scales. It is a period riven with hazards of many kinds (epistemic, eco-technological, political), which operate synergistically and cumulatively, requiring keen attention to what can’t be accounted for within entrenched discursive regimes. Research on and in late industrialism thus poses particular challenges, calling for something beyond extant theories of modernity and postmodernity, biopolitics, empire, and risk society. This presentation will highlight how late industrialism produces new vulnerabilities, and new forms and patterns of inequality.