This article was originally published on The Nexus blog.
Contributed by Ashley Baker, Scientific Content and Community Manager (Contractor), ACS Green Chemistry Institute
Green chemistry is a dynamic field, evolving to meet the multifaceted challenges of ecological and social crises as they arise. Greater integration of the social sciences presents a significant opportunity for chemists to help solve global, transdisciplinary challenges.
We had the opportunity to speak with Alessandra Quadrelli, Research Director at the Institute for Research on Catalysis and the Environment in Lyon, France and Advisory Board member for RSC's Green Chemistry journal. Her research focuses on the use of small molecules to store solar energy and create alternatives to fossil fuels through heterogeneous catalysis. At the same time, she applies her 20 years of experience as an academic practitioner of green chemistry, seven years of experience editing peer-reviewed journal articles, and her inner compass to conceptualize and develop new frameworks to diversify future research in chemistry for sustainability.
“I’m a chemist by training and by heart,” said Alessandra. “I chose chemistry because I was passionate about it. I tried to get closer and closer to subjects that had a direct impact that I could see around me. I wanted to merge doing research in the lab with being in society. For me, green chemistry embodied a way to realize this union."
Her concept of “situated green chemistries” puts forward 12 drivers for green chemistry rooted in the social science concept of situated knowledge which, as explained by Professor Charis Thompson, suggests that "objective knowledge, even our best scientific knowledge of the natural world, depends on the partiality of its material, technical, social, semiotic, and embodied means of being promulgated.”
“This is not an invitation to fall into relativism. It is a tool to strengthen the scientific approach,” said Alessandra. “The ‘situated green chemistries’ framework aims to make more explicit the existing link between green chemistry and social and ethical contexts. It is a proposal on how to strengthen established scientific methods by clarifying some of the culturally and historically rooted contexts that frame and orient all scientific endeavors. Here, the culturally and historically-rooted context I chose to put forward is the ‘desirable future’ that drives research in green chemistry.”
Currently, ten proposed drivers define various motivations and guiding principles for researchers in sustainable chemistry; drivers 11 and 12 remain to be defined.
- Planet-Scale Force: Collaborate with major stakeholders to maximize environmental impact
- Start-Uppers: Focus on entrepreneurial initiatives that drive green innovation commercially
- Social Justice: Engage in research that addresses societal inequalities
- Local Low-Tech: Develop low-tech solutions for small communities
- 5°C Fighters: Create solutions for resilience against severe environmental crises
- Do No Harm: Emphasize safety and minimal ecological and social impact
- North-South Equity: Address historical imbalances such as extractivism affecting the Global South
- Cure & Repair: Focus on chemistry that heals or restores ecological balance
- Libido Sciendi: Pursue science for the intrinsic pleasure and quest for knowledge
- Power of Art: Treat research as a creative, aesthetic endeavor akin to art
“Better science should help chemists respond to current crises faced by humans and the environment. The objective is that everything is green so it’s not green anymore – it’s just regular chemistry,” said Alessandra. “What is green is a moving frontier, and it’s necessary to redefine the frontier as it moves.”
Alessandra says this initial proposal is simply a “blueprint” that requires collective discussion by the community. She invites other scientists and social scientists to work transdisciplinarily to consider how cultural and historical contexts shape experimental approaches and data interpretation, as well as how to come to terms with these facts when producing chemistry research. This could, for example, result in changes in peer-review criteria and other evaluation practices.
“Thinking only about sustainability through the lens of a chemist or chemical engineer is not enough,” said Alessandra. “Chemistry is about complexity, interdependency, and systemic connections. You have to be explicit about the assumptions you’re mobilizing when you say something is sustainable.”
The chemistries framework was, in part, inspired by Alessandra’s time as a recruiter on the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) hiring committee, which suggested new candidates and promoted young researchers to full professorships.
“We had a whole series of apparently gender-neutral criteria for promoting, but the female-to-male ratio was very unbalanced, with males getting promoted more often,” she said. “We had to think about what in our criteria was biasing our selection and determine where our blind spots were. Among the blind spots we identified and worked on, we found that not taking into consideration the context within which the research was performed was leading to poorer evaluation.”
This led her to query what blind spots were similarly occurring within her scientific discipline’s research topics.
“I’m not surprised that as a feminist, I was involved in this idea of selection criteria for hiring. Being a feminist translated to me working toward overcoming power struggles––not to have more women employees, but to have a better hiring process: less injustice, including gender-wise, will ensue,” she explained. “It’s the same with chemistry research. It’s not about promoting one chemistry over another but about overcoming current limitations to the multiple possible hypotheses related to achieving sustainability. Exploring these wider routes also calls for widening the practices connected to research. Change will not happen if we don’t cohesively question some of the rules about what we consider good or excellent chemistry: is there room, in our referring criteria for example, for wider routes to sustainability beyond the ones currently established?”
Situated green chemistries emphasizes looking for ways to do excellent science outside the norm even if we don’t know how to evaluate it. Lab-based research co-developed with major stakeholders with a large positive environmental impact (the “Planet-Scale Force” driver) has many examples in the literature. The research community is familiar with a potential path for lab-based research to go from concept to production plants being built, and the evaluation criteria for this type of research are well-established.
In contrast, social struggle-based chemistry research (Alessandra calls it the ”Social Justice” driver in her situated chemistries framework and uses a 2015 paper to exemplify it) requires different criteria to define what makes an excellent publication in this field. Alessandra believes in a broad sharing of knowledge across fields to advance science and create new understanding. Drawing from Donna Haraway’s philosophy, one of the original proponents of the situated knowledges concept, this will create more diverse avenues for addressing sustainability without over-relying on a sub-set of similar solutions. It therefore offers a chance to do more creative and more objective science.
“As an example of transdisciplinary work, there is a polymer chemist who wanted to connect more with citizen interest, so she worked with bread makers,” said Alessandra. “She studied the fabric of the gluten fibers in different kinds of wheats and connected this knowledge with the quality made bread out of these wheats. She evaluated how the bread turned out with bread makers as well as health practitioners who evaluated the long-term health outcomes of eating different kinds of bread.”
To create truly diverse labs that generate innovative solutions, it’s imperative to encourage people to bring their whole selves to the lab, equipped with unique perspectives that result in new ideas.
“What situated knowledge proposes is that who we are, with our values, history, choices, and personal drivers can also beneficially elicit new types of pertinent questions, new research practices and topics, how we decide to answer them, and how we evaluate data.”
Alessandra says her journey of understanding how to gain control over the situatedness of her research is ongoing, and she invites others to explore what worlds they want their research to help usher in, how that influences what they bring to their work, and how they evaluate the work of others.
“What fired me up when I was a 20-year-old about ideas of justice, of what a world that I desired would look like, and what changes could happen…this still nourishes what I seek out, who I am, and the connections I make,” said Alessandra. “If we develop the conditions that allow us to align who we are with what we do, we’ll feel better and have a chance to do better and more objective science. It increases the diversity of our routes to sustainability, too. In this urgent quest for sustainability, I really hope we can hedge our bets: other pertinent chemistries are possible and we should give them a chance to exist. The situated knowledge approach can help us navigate how to do that.”
___
Are you interested in learning more about situated green chemistries and getting involved? Would you like to participate in community work to create criteria to evaluate broad chemistry problems and build on this framework? Please contact Alessandra by email or through LinkedIn).
