This event is part of the Atmospheric Apparitions mini-symposium on Sept 18-19 2025. It is is free and open to the public. We encourage you to visit the departmental Atmospheric Apparitions: Particle Pollutants – Dust, Ash, Smog and Smoke! exhibition in the Liu Lobby Gallery on view from July 21-Sept 26, 2025.
Photo credit: Eric Sucar
Photo credit: Eric SucarSpeaker:
Dr. Jessica Varner (University of Pennsylvania)
Title:
Thinking Like a Chemical, Teach-in and Workshop
Abstract:
Join Jessica Varner for a teach-in and workshop to think through the challenges of understanding chemicals beyond the seemingly apolitical periodic table. Through collaborative writing and the development of a shared bibliography—including scholarly texts, archival materials, artistic practices, and other relevant sources—participants will interrogate the cultural, ethical, and historical dimensions of chemical substances. In response to anthropologist Joseph Dumit’s provocation to “think like a substance,” the workshop instead proposes to “think like a chemical” as a methodological pivot to explore the ethical, cultural, and historical sources around chemical compounds and particulate matter, and the uneven geographies of toxicity which connect us through the uneasy themes of contamination, uncertainty, exposures, body burdens, geographical unevenness, new mixtures, extraction localities, waste detachment, colonization, imperialism, ethical use, and more. The outcome of this collective effort and interactive, interdisciplinary workshop will be a publicly accessible repository of resources to support further research and teaching in critical chemical geographies.
Bio:
Jessica Varner, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Landscape and Environmental History at the University of Pennsylvania (Weitzman School, Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning). Her work explores the intersections between synthetic chemicals, design histories, toxicities, and environmental advocacy.
Her current book project, Chemical Desires, uncovers the ties between corporate chemical firms and construction materials in the United States and Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. This work received generous support from the Fulbright Foundation, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), National Science Foundation, Science History Institute, MIT Martin Society of Fellows, USC Society of Fellows, Getty Research Institute, ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies), and the Graham Foundation (Carter Manny Dissertation Award).
Her current projects include a book on chemical modernity and toxicity in 20th-century design materials, an essay on mold Stachybotrys chartarum (or black mold), an NSF research project on community-led environmental history and cumulative exposures, a co-edited volume on models and a Climate Changed, a co-edited volume on consent/refusal in environmental-right-to-know futures, and new book research about neurotoxins and material culture in the Global South and U.S. South that considers how self-determination pushed beyond harm and against distanced violence and neurotoxic effects.
She is also a trained architect and has worked collectively with two non-profit organizations, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) (researcher and steering committee member since 2019) and Coming Clean (toxics-free coalition member since 2022), to center justice in toxics policy and turn research into action.
This is an in person event hosted in room 229 Geography.
