Book Review
Book Review | Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds, by Sara Ann Wylie (Duke University Press, 2018)
San Francisco State University
ljquinta@sfsu.edu
In Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds, Sara Ann Wylie describes “corporate bodies” as “those networked and peopled, physical and environmental assemblages that are presently creating the global oil and gas industry” (13). The destructive consequences of such industries produce what Wylie calls “chemical bonds” between communities and the industries where bodies, DNAs, and overall health become sites of intersectional knowledge production. Wylie explores this embodied power dynamic in this methodologically interdisciplinary book, unwinding the infrastructure of environmentally destructive industries that induce health issues such as asthma, internal bleeding, miscarriages, and neurological problems. Wylie’s book powerfully calls attention to the ways in which the production of industry data gaps purposefully obscures the environmental health consequences caused by fracking. Unable to be viewed or analyzed by the public, data about the communities most affected by fossil fuel extraction becomes unstudiable. A social and environmental justice praxis that seeks to interrogate and redress this absence of data hence creates and inserts interdisciplinary knowledge kept subjugated by powerful oil and gas interests. This is the project of Fractivism. A social justice intervention in data production, Fractivism gives detailed examples and models for researchers, academics, activists, students, and community members to follow as methods for creating sites of knowledge sharing. Through collaborative and open digital platforms, harmful and deadly “chemical bonds” that are born out of extractive geographies can be dismembered through coalitional knowledge production across disciplines.
The book can be used by justice-centered ethnographers, computer scientists, environmental/land/water activists, data analysists, public health practitioners and advocates, students, and anyone else looking to form cross-sector collaborations that create sources of accountability against corporate perpetrators of environmental destruction. Researchers, teachers, and students in STS, environmental studies, anthropology, data science, hydrology, climate science, energy policy, economics, and public health will find their interests in this book.
Chapters 1 and 2 provide the historical context for the boom in fracking and details how petro-industries use corporate strategies that create “regimes of imperceptibility.” Wylie unpacks these regimes that make strategically difficult the study between industry-induced environmental damage and illnesses. In this context of purposeful industry gatekeeping of epistemic engagement, Chapters 3 and 4 offer examples for creating a mode of “civic science” (265), like TEDx, that directly confronts the disconnected links between environment and illness with collaboratively produced databases. This collaborative confrontation, what Wiley names HEIR (health environmental impact response) science is meant to transform people’s relationships with hegemonic fossil fuel narratives by providing a digital platform for community-based storytelling and sharing. The second half of the book, starting with Chapter 5, presents an “STS in practice” (17) that can increase accountability and responsibility for environmental and social damages caused by capitalist corporate industries. Ensuing chapters discuss examples of such work. A map- and online tool-making research group, ExtrAct models the kinds of digital media infrastructures making for robust cross-sector collaborations. Wylie explores the process of creating such collaborations by foregrounding WellWatch, a community monitoring tool that formed part of the broader strategic confrontation to the fossil fuel-produced information gaps and “regimes of impermeability” (255). Wylie details a thorough reflection of WellWatch as a “platform for popular epidemiology” (221) that united integrated mapping, oral histories, and other data from New York, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas—a cross-geographic data information project that brought together otherwise isolated frontline communities that were suffering in constructed silences by the oil and gas industries.
The book reaches beyond the nooks of knowledge production in the university and directly confronts these academic silos by proposing methods of collaborative and cross-sector efforts. For STS scholars, models of “STS in practice” help instruct students in the practical and political dimensions of environmental, data, and health justice praxis. For non-profits and organizations seeking ways to foster relationships with justice-minded and practice-oriented scientists and researchers, Fractivism offers exemplars for creating those infrastructures for multi-scalar and multi-sited partnerships from university researchers working with local communities to advocacy at the state and national levels. And for those workers in extractive industries who find themselves questioning the societal, environmental, and climate impacts of industry practices that continue to frack, extract, and destroy land, waters, and community health, this book offers ways to channel important knowledges, tools, and interests towards accountability and responsibility. Fractivism calls for “for an interdisciplinary effort toward industrial embodiment to record, aggregate, and remediate the material risks posed by this industrial activity so that the lives of those it harms can be improved” (280).
Chapter 5 is useful for academics who would like to untangle their institution’s relationships with corporate extractivist corporations, introducing methodological interventions that are both epistemic and strategic. As an example, Wylie analyzes the collaboration between Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the largest oilfield services provider Schlumberger, and exposes the hegemonic and violent pedagogies of “immersive experiences”, simulation technologies that erase, obscure, and conceal the people, bodies, and environments on surface landscapes in order to extract, exploit, and pillage “subsurface riches, without the knowledge or participation of surface residents” (127). Thinking through the “immersive simulation” (123), Wylie exposes the fabricated infrastructures in technology, data, and extractive industries that allow for violent university research practices, such as those between MIT students and researchers, that continue a legacy of unquestioned consequences and harm done to environmental and societal contexts (127). Thus, it would be particularly important for radical intellectuals and/or organizers who are also academics in higher education to borrow and build from Fractivism’s call to reveal the epistemic power dynamics driving the destructive consequences of universities’ collaboration with extractive industries. To reveal these power dynamics constitutes one of the many ways one can leverage academic positions for social justice rather than for structures of environmental and health violence. Wylie’s short discussion on Native American erasure in the context of research science and nuclear testing intersects with what other scholars have centralized as a key component to decolonize the Anthropocene (Whyte 2017). Wylie’s conceptualization of the “modern human” as one in “pursuit of the control of nature” (277) should be further distinguished as to not collapse “all humans” into a homogenous context of culpability when studying environmental and health injustices. Thus, pairing Fractivism’s extraordinary collaborative methodologies alongside frameworks and praxes from Indigenous and Native American studies, Indigenous science, and settler colonial studies, can continue to unwind analyses of settler colonial protagonism within industrialism and its destructive consequences in order to form alliances and solidarities with wider communities on the frontlines.
Fractivism is especially useful for the classroom and for interdisciplinary researchers and students alike to understand how “STS in practice” can be a model for material projects that unite those who want to try and find solutions with others—not in isolation. This book is a tool for those looking to utilize research, data, or analytical methods for social and environmental justice movements broadly. Chapters 3 and 4 provide exemplary discussion of how TEDx built the first public database with information about chemicals used in fracking and the ways in which they produce health consequences, such as endocrine disruption. Producing such public information forces a public conversation where there was once silence on behalf of the industry. So these chapters show how data justice is part of the larger movement of environmental justice efforts where knowledge production from below, or as discussed in Chapter 5, “citizen science” is a key methodological intervention in “regimes of imperceptibility” (255). The text closes with a provocation for potential organizers in every sector: “How can we grapple with environmental health problems such as climate change, endocrine disruption, and chemical contamination due to fracking that transcend biological, legal, and social boundaries?” (255). Sharply following the process and praxis that is embedded in “STS in practice” is the value system that believes how important it is to “create a social-technical infrastructure for recognizing common problems and helping communities form to address them” (218) beyond academic settings that have historically hoarded power through knowledge production for capitalist and colonial entities, in this case, fossil fuel industries and economies.
References
Whyte, Kyle. 2017. “Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” English Language Notes 55 (1): 153–62. https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-55.1-2.153
Author Bio
Leslie Quintanilla is a co-founder of the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice and an Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University in Women and Gender Studies.