Ruination Science: Producing knowledge about toxicants from the rubble of Chilean regulatory science

• In Event: Governing Toxic Waste 1

Abstract

Most conventional analyses on the practice of science in developing countries tend to criticize the precariousness surrounding the whole endeavor. As a consequence, scientific knowledge on such locations tends to be substandard, greatly diminishing its potential to deal with several complex issues affecting such societies, especially environmental degradation due to industrial waste. In recent years a growing body of STS-inspired research has been trying to overturn such narratives, seeing them mostly as just another manifestation of colonial valuation practices. Nonwestern environmental science, they argue, should be analyzed as having its own logic and achieving its own results, some of them quite unexpected from the outset. This paper aims to contribute to this task by analyzing material collected by the author while carrying out ethnographic fieldwork on CENMA, an environmental science lab located in Santiago, Chile. Established with foreign funding shortly after the return of democracy in 1990, CENMA was posed to become the main location for the practice of state-of-the-art regulatory science on toxics-related issues. However, two decades of political neglect and continual budget cuts, has left it on a state of (almost) terminal ruination. Through the analysis of practical vignettes, the paper argues that such situation should not be seen solely from a critical point of view. Ruination science, such as the one practiced at CENMA, tends to be messy, warm and ethically entangled, always on the look for alternative, highly case-specific, methods to answer environmental concerns. Especially in locations crisscrossed by multiple kinds of toxic degradation, frequently ruination science appears as much more able to deal with local issues than standard western-style science. Times of ruination, it seems, call for ruination science.

Author

• Sebastian Ureta, Universidad Alberto Hurtado