Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers - Softcover

Murphy, Michelle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822336715 ISBN 13: 9780822336716

Verlag: Combined Academic Publ., 2006

Inhaltsangabe

Before 1980, sick building syndrome did not exist. By the 1990s, it was among the most commonly investigated occupational health problems in the United States. Afflicted by headaches, rashes, and immune system disorders, office workers—mostly women—protested that their workplaces were filled with toxic hazards; yet federal investigators could detect no chemical cause. This richly detailed history tells the story of how sick building syndrome came into being: how indoor exposures to chemicals wafting from synthetic carpet, ink, adhesive, solvents, and so on became something that relatively privileged Americans worried over, felt, and ultimately sought to do something about. As M. Murphy shows, sick building syndrome provides a window into how environmental politics moved indoors.

Sick building syndrome embodied a politics of uncertainty that continues to characterize contemporary American environmental debates. Murphy explores the production of uncertainty by juxtaposing multiple histories, each of which explains how an expert or lay tradition made chemical exposures perceptible or imperceptible, existent or nonexistent. They show how uncertainty emerged from a complex confluence of feminist activism, office worker protests, ventilation engineering, toxicology, popular epidemiology, corporate science, and ecology. In an illuminating case study, she reflects on EPA scientists’ efforts to have their headquarters recognized as a sick building. Murphy brings all of these histories together in what is not only a thorough account of an environmental health problem but also a much deeper exploration of the relationship between history, materiality, and uncertainty.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

M. Murphy is Assistant Professor in the History Department and the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto.

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"How does an illness come into being? In this provocative study, Michelle Murphy takes us on a journey into the making of an environmental illness, into the spaces of the modern office building, gendered labor practices, and workers' bodies to reveal what is perceived and what is invisible in the built environment where many Americans spend their working days. How sick buildings and indoor air pollution became visible problems in environmental health is a story that takes us far beyond the architectural history of office buildings. It takes us deep into the architecture of reality: into how we know and what we know about environmental exposures and the uncertainties they pose both to knowledge and human health."--Gregg Mitman, author of "The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900-1950"

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Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty

Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women WorkersBy Michelle Murphy

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2006 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3671-6

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................................................ixIntroduction.....................................................................................1[1] Man in a Box: Building-Machines and the Science of Comfort...................................19[2] Building Ladies into the Office Machine......................................................35[3] Feminism, Surveys, and Toxic Details.........................................................57[4] Indoor Pollution at the Encounter of Toxicology and Popular Epidemiology.....................81[5] Uncertainty, Race, and Activism at the EPA...................................................111[6] Building Ecologies, Tobacco, and the Politics of Multiplicity................................131[7] How to Build Yourself a Body in a Safe Space.................................................151Epilogue.........................................................................................179Notes............................................................................................181Bibliography.....................................................................................213Index............................................................................................241

Chapter One

Man in a Box

Building-Machines and the Science of Comfort

[1] Crack open an office building constructed from the late twentieth century and you will find a machine. Behind glass and concrete, behind suspended ceilings and drywall were the building's guts: aluminum ducts worming through dense pink insulation, crisscrossed wires delivering electrical signals, boilers burbling in basements, droning fans caged by grates. Office buildings in the late twentieth century were machines engineered to control the indoor climate. They were machines designed to encourage the buzz of "information" work inside and to produce a clean, orderly corporate world sealed o from both the polluted outdoors and the dangerous factory floor.

Office buildings were not just luxurious spaces for the American managerial class; they were also constructed to promote the efficient labor of the droves of mostly women in the office's lower ranks. Perceptions about the physiological needs of these laborers were built into the very pipes and ducts of office buildings. Not simply a pleasant and passive backdrop, the office building's cool, comfortable air was the material manifestation of a historically specific, gendered, and raced way of apprehending the relationship between office workers' bodies and the spaces that ordered their labor. More specifically, inscribed into the humidifiers and thermostats was a mechanistic and "modernist" way of assembling bodies and buildings together, a formula set in the interwar years. It was a relatively simple assemblage, shaped by the reductionism of that era, and thus the building-as-machine is a useful history to crack open first. While at initial glance an arcane topic, the history of ventilation engineering is installed in virtually every building constructed in the late-twentieth-century United States. Sitting in your office, the university library, or even your home, you feel this history every day.

Man in a Box

Imagine a ventilation engineering laboratory in the years between the world wars, when standardization signaled the height of scientism. The focal point of the lab was the "psychrometric room," a small square side room separated o from the rest of the lab to form an environmental chamber. The chamber was sealed airtight. It was an empty box (see the "air conditioning room" in Fig. 1).

Inside the box, young white men, mostly engineering students, sometimes stripped to underwear, repetitively lifted light weights. Outside the chamber, the researchers, sleeves rolled, used sensitive instruments such as the hot-wire anemometer and the whirled psychrometer to monitor the interior atmosphere. They used anal thermometers and odor scales to probe their subjects' physiological responses to mechanically generated climates. These older white men, university professors or presidents of lucrative air-conditioning businesses (such as the Carrier Air Conditioning Corporation), were members of the American Society for Heating and Ventilation Engineers (ASHVE). One of the ASHVE's most exalted projects was undertaken by the Research Technical Advisory Committee on Physiological Reactions, which experimentally studied how to mechanically fabricate an indoor climate for human comfort. In the 1920s, their research into human comfort and artificial environments commanded lab space at Harvard and Yale, gained government support at the U.S. Bureau of Mines, and attracted distinguished researchers, such as Wallis Carrier, the "father of air conditioning," C.-E. A. Winslow, the respected editor of the American Journal of Public Health, and Constantine Yaglou and Philip Drinker, professors in Harvard's Department of Industrial Hygiene. Studying men in boxes (and boxers) was their means of scientifically articulating an "optimum" indoor climate for nonindustrial buildings of all sorts, but especially office buildings, whose owners were among their biggest customers. They were searching for a universal indoor climatic standard that could be manufactured within any building, anywhere-what the architect Le Corbusier called "respiration exact," but what ASHVE engineers more prosaically termed "the comfort zone."

What qualities made up "comfort" in the great indoors of the interwar years? What qualities were inserted into the empty box? ASHVE researchers concentrated on just three: temperature, humidity, and airflow. In a self-referential circle, these researchers sought to measure comfort only in terms of those attributes of air altered by the ventilation technologies their companies already manufactured. Temperature had long been alterable upward with steam radiators or heated forced air; airflow with fans and ducts. The ability to mechanically alter humidity, called "air conditioning," was relatively new in the early twentieth century, having first been developed for industrial processes and only in this period extended to "comfort cooling." Other qualities, such as the molecular composition of air or the microbes that floated within it, remained undetected by ASHVE's experimental setup. What was uncontrolled and undetected in the box remained irrelevant to their project of comfort and in practice resided in the realm of imperceptibility. Only temperature, humidity, and airflow, and not other attributes, were materialized by modern ventilation engineering.

Yet in the recent past, before engineers-turned-merchants hawked air conditioners, other qualities had populated indoor air. Ventilation engineers had previously promoted the mechanical supply of "fresh air" in the name of healthfulness, not comfort. The fight against foul air, excess carbon dioxide, and miasma (disease-causing air emanating from organic matter, such as filthy rivers, waste piles, and human bodies) had allied ventilation engineers with public health reformers, called sanitarians, who sought to improve the living conditions of the worthy laboring poor by constructing sewers,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Combined Academic Publ.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822336715
• ISBN 13: 9780822336716
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland