... Engaging in theories of responsibilization, this chapter seeks to demonstrate the often intimate links between responsibilization and biopolitical claims of dependency, blame, helplessness, and culpability, and to show responsibility’s complex relationship with practices of irresponsibilization...

... Spanish colonial botany culpable for its interests in environmental extraction, this chapter examines US colonial botanists’ participation in similar pursuits. It takes as its case study US colonial botanists’ writings on materials of Philippine weaving. Such writings demonstrate how systematics served...

... of the Philippines. The United States established itself in the colony, erecting institutions of scientific research to, among other objectives, survey the profitability of the islands. Contrary to historiography that has only held Spanish colonial botany culpable for its interests in environmental extraction...

..., and culpability, and to show responsibility’s complex relationship with practices of irresponsibilization. Ethnographically, my analysis pivots around an interaction between a radiobiologist and a veteran who participated in British nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific in the 1950s, developments within experimental...