This post was written as a companion piece to Chaudhury’s dissertation, “Chasing Flames: Racial Capitalism in Fire Ecology Research and Praxis” (Science and Technology Studies, York University, 2025). You can read the abstract here.
A lot of people ask me why I chose to do my research on wildfires. It is, after all, a very timely topic amidst the state of the polycrisis we collectively find ourselves in. There are many answers to this. Some of it may sound like legal fiction—in the sense that I had to find a research topic that conforms to the expectations of a PhD dissertation in the subject area of science and technology studies (STS). The truth itself is much more complex. As I started and continued my PhD journey, there were far too many topics in environmental STS that fascinated me. In general, I am moved deeply by the potential of considering seriously the agency of more-than-human worlds, pluriverses, and their ontologies and cosmologies in disrupting the anthropocentric ways in which we do research—even as it concerns critical environmental scholarship.
There were many times in my PhD journey when I deeply questioned the meaning and value of research as a site where human creativity can effectively enact change, especially as it seemed that academic institutions were being routinely undermined, underfunded, and otherwise made increasingly irrelevant during a time when attacks on knowledge infrastructures, both in Canada and internationally, were part of the ongoing move towards a neoliberal corporatized model of research and education.
But the truth about this dissertation, if it can be approximated in words, is far more complex. In this essay, I will present fragments from my dissertation writing that did not make it to the final cut, for many reasons, but chiefly because they failed to adhere to the norms of a dissertation in the field of STS. Yet it is this writing that was the most potent in letting me think about fire in my dissertation in the way I did. This companion essay seeks to honour those “killed darlings” and situate my dissertation in a more truthful way.
“This companion essay seeks to honour those “killed darlings” and situate my dissertation in a more truthful way.”
The title of this dissertation, Chasing Flames, is an intentional nod to the eclecticism of the methodology and the scattering of the field, and the associated modes of inquiry and attention required as experienced through the process of research itself. In many ways, the chase is both for containing the site of the reaction in question (i.e., fire/combustion) and for focusing on the subjectivity that shapes the orientation to the site of research. This chase is best described in Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Circular Ruins,” which I first encountered in my teenage years; however, in the dissertation research process, this story re-emerged in my memory as I pondered cultural perceptions of fire.1
In my present appraisal of this story, it is a very apt example of some of the analytics in which my research is grounded: dis/continuity, emergence, trans-locality, place-specificity, and relationships with the more-than-human world. Having this story in mind was important in framing my methodological choices. In the story, a wizard conjures up a man into existence with the help of a temple deity known simply as “fire,” who can shapeshift into various forms, such as a bull, a rose, or a storm. The fire deity asks that the conjured man, once his training period is completed by the wizard, be sent to another temple in ruins further away as a potential devotee for the same deity. Once the wizard has built the man to his liking, he sends him off to the second temple after destroying the memories related to his creation and training, “so that his son should never know he is a phantom, so that he shall think of himself as a man like any other.”2
After some time, the wizard hears of his son from travellers who say he is able to walk on fire without being burned. This causes the wizard to worry that his son will eventually discover his true origins as not a real flesh-and-blood person but something artificially conjured. At this moment, a forest fire emerges and engulfs the temple where the wizard resides. Borges describes the scene and its aftermath:
First (after a long drought) a remote cloud, as light as a bird, appeared on a hill; then, toward the South, the sky took on the rose color of leopard’s gums; then came clouds of smoke which rusted the metal of the nights; afterwards came the panic‐stricken flight of wild animals. For what had happened many centuries before was repeating itself. The ruins of the sanctuary of the god of Fire was destroyed by fire. In a dawn without birds, the wizard saw the concentric fire licking the walls. For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the water, but then he understood that death was coming to crown his old age and absolve him from his labors. He walked toward the sheets of flame. They did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.3
Borges’s protagonist has a proximity to the flames of a forest fire that I, as an observer, cannot take. Imagining my positionality as that of the protagonist allows me to imagine the more-than-human world in ways my current embodiment cannot. The wizard’s situated knowledge is something I can only grasp through speculative fiction. Yet, as he is the ideal observer, I used speculative judgement from time to time in my dissertation to experiment with fire as a forensic and diagnostic tool, exploring how fire speaks across spatial and temporal limitations and current knowledge systems. Notice also that the story ultimately portrays the temple deity “fire” guiding both the wizard and the conjured son to help itself spread. To me, this is an allegory not only about fire itself across ecosystems, but also about the diffusion of technoscientific knowledges, intermingling with other phenomena, and birthing a pluriverse of worlds in which racial capitalism exerts influence.
Situated knowledges, more-than-human worlds, and the moral economy of fire
Drawing from Borges’s story, the idea of situated knowledges is a key informant in my theoretical and methodological development. Donna Haraway coined the term to describe how embodiment and lived experiences influence knowledge production in scientific inquiry, highlighting that there is no objective understanding of a phenomenon, only approximation.4
“Tracing these regimes of valuation is vital to understanding how ecosystem fires and their formalized study intersect with broader socioeconomic dynamics.”
Informed by this open-ended approach to inquiry, but also by the problems of embodiment when studying fires, I became attentive to how fire ecologists attend to the biophysical environment, especially as much of the institutional fire ecology work in the US is shaped by settler colonial imperatives. Tracing these regimes of valuation is vital to understanding how ecosystem fires and their formalized study intersect with broader socioeconomic dynamics.
This understanding of positionality in relation to fire influenced my fieldwork. On one level, it secured my commitment to attending to emergence in the field and using intuition to guide me.5 On another level, it reminded me, as Bruno Latour describes, that translating a field into textual and graphic knowledge involves circulating references which in turn create the semblance of a cohesive field of study by combining together disparate pieces of knowledge obtained through diverse methodologies.6 Situated knowledge, exemplified by Borges’ story, is a poignant reminder that fieldwork and research are part of a larger network of stories, requiring care and curiosity in how other worlds influenced my research journey.
Tracing flows and alchemical transformations of “phlogiston” in contemporary fire and combustion narratives
In my dissertation, I attended to how racial capitalism shapes fire ecology at ecosystem-wide scales and how these applications entrench colonial and capitalist norms. Yet fire is not only a phenomenon in the “wild”; it also appears in built environment, often violently and unevenly.
This compelled me to ask questions I had carried from the start of my ethnographic work: how are racial capitalist logics in fire ecology reproduced in urban built environments? How do buildings and communities carry traces of colonialism and capitalism in how they relate to fire?
These questions had been at the forefront of my consciousness during fieldwork in the San Francisco Bay Area, marked by overlapping crises: widespread wildfires, the coronavirus pandemic, and renewed public attention to racialized police brutality in 2020. Public health research shows that wildfire smoke harms multiple organ systems, and Black, Indigenous, and people of colour communities face greater exposure and risk, a pattern acutely observed in the Bay Area.7
“Public health research shows that wildfire smoke harms multiple organ systems, and Black, Indigenous, and people of colour communities face greater exposure and risk, a pattern acutely observed in the Bay Area.”
I began to wonder whether there was something deeper, perhaps something rooted in historical, conceptual, even metaphysical layers, in how fire has been imagined in relation to bodies, particularly racialized bodies, within built environments. How do older ways of theorizing fire continue to shape whose lives are protected, whose are exposed, and whose losses register as crises?
To address these questions, I turned to the history of combustion. What follows is a speculative inquiry that did not survive the disciplinary constraints of STS. It was cut because it did not conform to expectations of methodological rigour. Yet it remained central to how I understood fire as a site where matter, meaning, and valuation transmute together and show as the throughlines of racial capitalism becomes manifest.
Theorizing combustion beyond mechanistic philosophy
According to the now-defunct phlogiston theory, all flammable matter contains a substance called phlogiston that is released during combustion.8 This conception emerged from alchemy, the precursor to modern chemistry, and the technoscientific imaginaries that alchemical practice helped produce.9
Within alchemy, phlogiston was not merely a chemical placeholder. It was associated with vitalism – the belief that living beings and lively matter are animated by an intrinsic life force.10 This “vital spark,” later theorized by Henri Bergson as élan vital,11 distinguished living from nonliving matter and drew heavily on Christian notions of soul and animation.12 Phlogiston operated not only as an explanatory device for combustion but as a bridge between material transformation and spiritual vitality.
Although eventually displaced by the oxygen theory of combustion which is the present-day model in use, phlogiston’s metaphoric traces remain. Vitalist assumptions surface even in contemporary fire discourses that claim mechanistic neutrality. Elizabeth Povinelli argues that late liberalism is structured by a persistent distinction between Life and Nonlife.13 These vitalist imaginaries provide a diagnostic entry point for examining how racial capitalist valuation regimes sort bodies, environments, and infrastructures.
Phlogiston continues to circulate, not as scientific fact, but as moral residue. It informs narratives about fire, colonialism, gender, and race, animating some lives and material projects while rendering others disposable.
Valuation, combustion, and moral economy
Understanding capitalism requires grappling with value. In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi argued that under capitalism, land, labour, and money became “fictitious commodities”—entities imbued with market value despite not being produced for sale.14 Subsequent scholars have extended this argument to the valuation of knowledge itself. What matters here is not only commodification but the moral economy that governs valuation and commodification. In colonial and capitalist histories, the natural resources of colonized lands were routinely valued over the lives and relational ecologies of the people who inhabit them. In contemporary contexts, similar hierarchies persist, often reframed through technocratic languages such as “ecosystem services.”15
The Industrial Revolution, driven by fossil fuels, mechanization, and the reorganization of labour, was fundamentally a combustion-based transformation. The materials burned to power this transformation carried mythologies, histories, and affective narratives that continue to circulate.
Combustion, I suggest, plays a central role in these valuation regimes. The Industrial Revolution, driven by fossil fuels, mechanization, and the reorganization of labour, was fundamentally a combustion-based transformation. The materials burned to power this transformation carried mythologies, histories, and affective narratives that continue to circulate.
Although modern science explains combustion mechanistically through the oxygen theory, the moral economy surrounding fire remains saturated with vitalist language. Fire is animated, personified, feared, mourned, and celebrated. These animacies matter. They shape how losses are registered and whose suffering compels response.
Image: [Left] A person writing “Pray for Our Community” on a wall underneath a lit up heart at a Catholic vigil after Grenfell Tower tragedy. “Grenfell Tower fire: 24 hours on” by Catholic Church (England and Wales) is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. [Right] Headline in German newspaper declaring first help for Notre-Dame. “The Notre Dame fire and the aftermath dominate the news” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
Seeing phlogiston in the 21st century
In recent years, alongside escalating wildfires, fires in built environments have exposed stark inequalities. Two such fires occurred at the symbolic centres of Enlightenment and industrial modernity: London and Paris.
In 2017, Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey social housing building in one of London’s wealthiest boroughs, caught fire.16 The tower was primarily inhabited by low-income Black, Asian, and minority ethnic residents. The fire spread rapidly due to flammable cladding. Seventy-two people died. Years of ignored warnings, regulatory neglect, and infrastructural abandonment preceded the tragedy.17 Grenfell exposed how colonial and capitalist geographies of disposability have returned “home.” The same logics that once justified extraction and abandonment abroad now rendered certain lives within the metropole expendable.
Two years later, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris caught fire. While much of its roof was destroyed, global response was immediate. Nearly one billion euros were raised overnight for restoration.18 Around the same time, historic Black churches in Louisiana were burned in acts of white supremacist arson.19 The disparity in attention and funding was stark.
Discussions about restoring Notre Dame even invoked colonial supply chains. One proposal involved sourcing oak from an underwater forest in Ghana, despite apparent ecological risk to the local community; a plainly extractive solution legible through France’s ongoing economic ties to former colonies.20
If phlogiston stands in for lively matter, then the fire at Notre Dame released a form of vitality that demanded immediate replenishment. By contrast, the phlogiston released as Black churches burned, or as Grenfell residents died, did not command equivalent moral urgency. Here, racial capitalism renders some burned bodies as Nonlife as per Povinelli’s rendering, while animating wood, stone, and a particular kind of European heritage with vitality worthy of restoration.
Groups such as Forensic Architecture documented Grenfell in painstaking detail, reconstructing how the fire spread and how state neglect amplified its lethality.21 Yet this forensic attention arrived only after lives were lost. Residents had long warned of unsafe conditions, yet their knowledge was dismissed.22 Whose testimony matters, and when, becomes another site where valuation operates.
Meanwhile, Notre Dame’s restoration mobilized expertise, resources, and political will almost instantly. The contrast reveals how flows of metaphorical phlogiston, namely, attention, care, capital, are routed along racialized and colonial lines.
Residence time, transmutation, and the afterlives of combustion
Christina Sharpe’s notion of residence time offers another way to think about phlogiston’s afterlives.23 Writing about the Middle Passage, Sharpe reminds us that sodium from human blood persists in ocean waters for millions of years. She writes:
The amount of time it takes for a substance to enter the ocean and then leave the ocean is called residence time. Human blood is salty, and sodium…has a residence time of 260 million years. And what happens to the energy that is produced in the waters? It continues cycling like atoms in residence time. We, Black people, exist in the residence time of the wake, a time in which “everything is now. It is all now.”24
If we understand, at least at a metaphorical level, that “phlogiston,” similar to the bloodborne sodium in Sharpe’s conception, to have a residence time in the atmosphere, we can similarly appreciate that after every burning event, a corresponding residence time is initiated. The by-products of combustion include carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, which are then transmuted to other forms of biotic and abiotic carbon compounds through the carbon cycle. In this way, as carbon is one of the fundamental elements of life on Earth, we see a direct connection to metaphorical phlogiston to carbon itself. What can, then, the dispossession, disruption and the siphoning of the flows of “phlogiston” in certain spatial and temporal contexts tell us about current modes of extraction and valuation? Given the colonial legacy in our conversations about certain building fires, how might we understand how the vital principle of life is mediated by the colonialist-capitalist superstructure? These are some of the questions, fire and its associated transmutations provoke us to ask.
Carbon is foundational to life, and it is present in wood and in bodies alike. Yet under racial capitalism, these shared materialities are valued differently. Burned wood can be mourned and restored; burned bodies can be rendered invisible. As scholars Zoe Todd and Heather Davis argue, the Anthropocene’s origins lie not in the 20th century but in 1610, when colonial genocide measurably altered atmospheric carbon levels.25 Here again, the world’s phlogiston balance was disrupted in service of empire.
“Whether framed through oxygen or phlogiston, fire remains a site of revelation.”
Whether framed through oxygen or phlogiston, fire remains a site of revelation. By tracing how lively, fiery matter is diverted, and for whose benefit, we can begin to see how colonial-capitalist logics operate while using fire as a diagnostic entry point, well beyond wilderness ecologies, saturating the built environment itself.
Attending to these flows does not resolve the violence they expose. But it may offer a way to alchemize new structures, ones that redistribute vitality, attention, and care more equitably, and refuse the quiet normalization of whose lives are allowed to burn without consequence.
What kind of pyrosocial worlds do we want to birth?
Wildfire smoke over Toronto, making the sky turn orange in 2023 collapsed the distance between “wildlands” and cities often used in frameworks such as the wildland-urban interface to understand fire ecologies. Skies turned orange. Bodies carried the memory of smoke inhalation. These pyrosocial worlds are not evenly inhabited. Racial capitalism lives in our lungs, our housing, our labour, our institutions.
Arts-based, sensory, and embodied practices became portals for me to engage these realities otherwise, moving beyond disciplinary grids, Cartesian separations, and extractive epistemologies and the register of written language itself, as in the final years of this dissertation research, my mind-body began to go into burn out, and something beyond the realm of words wanted to speak through the body.
I came back to my body, my art, my voice as something in me reverberated with one question:
What kind of pyrosocial worlds do we want to birth?
This is the provocation this dissertation ends with.
Feature Image: “Southern California Wildfires” by NASA Johnson is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Notes
1 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Circular Ruins,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (Penguin Books, 1999).
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99.
5 Bayo Akomolafe and Alnoor Ladha, “Perverse Particles, Entangled Monsters and Psychedelic Pilgrimages: Emergence as an onto-Epistemology of Not-Knowing,” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 17, no. 4 (2017): 819–39.
6 Bruno Latour, “The’pedofil’of Boa Vista: A Photo-Philosophical Montage,” Common Knowledge 4, no. 1 (1995).
7 Colleen E. Reid and Melissa May Maestas, “Wildfire Smoke Exposure under Climate Change: Impact on Respiratory Health of Affected Communities,” Current Opinion in Pulmonary Medicine 25, no. 2 (2019): 179; Ian P. Davies and Phil Levin, “Racial and Ethnic Minorities Are More Vulnerable to Wildfires,” The Conversation, November 6, 2018, http://theconversation.com/racial-and-ethnic-minorities-are-more-vulnerable-to-wildfires-106290.
8 Christopher McIntosh, “The Phlogiston Theory: A Late Relic Of Pre-Enlightenment Science,” in Handbook of Religion and the Authority of Science (Brill, 2010).
9 Ku-ming (Kevin) Chang, “Alchemy as Studies of Life and Matter: Reconsidering the Place of Vitalism in Early Modern Chymistry,” Isis 102, no. 2 (2011): 322–29, https://doi.org/10.1086/660141; Tenney L. Davis, “Neglected Evidence in the History of Phlogiston, Together with Observations on the Doctrine of Forms and the History of Alchemy,” Annals of Medical History 6, no. 3 (1924): 280–87.
10 Chang, “Alchemy as Studies of Life and Matter”; Hilde Hein, “The Endurance of the Mechanism: Vitalism Controversy,” Journal of the History of Biology 5, no. 1 (1972): 159–88, JSTOR.
11 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, New edition (Dover Publications Inc., 2003).
12 Tai Tak Andy Wong and T. Wolfe Charles, “The Return of Vitalism: Canguilhem, Bergson and the Project of a Biophilosophy,” The Care of Life, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015, 63–77.
13 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Duke University Press Books, 2016).
14 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 1 edition (Beacon Press, 2001).
15 Morgan M. Robertson, “The Nature That Capital Can See: Science, State, and Market in the Commodification of Ecosystem Services,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, no. 3 (2006): 367–87, https://doi.org/10.1068/d3304; R. K. Turner and G. C. Daily, “The Ecosystem Services Framework and Natural Capital Conservation,” Environmental and Resource Economics 39, no. 1 (2008): 25–35.
16 Ida Danewid, “The Fire This Time: Grenfell, Racial Capitalism and the Urbanisation of Empire,” European Journal of International Relations 26, no. 1 (2020): 289–313, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066119858388.
17 Robert Booth and Robert Booth Social affairs correspondent, “Grenfell Resident Who Raised Fire Concerns Labelled Troublemaker, Inquiry Told,” UK News, The Guardian, April 21, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/apr/21/grenfell-resident-who-raised-fire-concerns-labelled-troublemaker-inquiry-told; R. G. Watt, “Grenfell Tower Fire – a Tragic Case Study in Health Inequalities,” British Dental Journal 223, no. 7 (2017): 7, https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.bdj.2017.785.
18 Aditya Chakrabortty, “The Billionaires’ Donations Will Turn Notre Dame into a Monument to Hypocrisy,” Opinion, The Guardian, April 18, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/18/billionaires-donations-notre-dame-france-inequality.
19 P. R. Lockhart, “Black Churches in Louisiana See $1.9 Million Surge in Donations after Fire at Notre Dame Cathedral,” Vox, April 17, 2019, https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/4/17/18412465/louisiana-black-churches-fire-donations-notre-dame.
20 Aaron Akinyemi, “How an Underwater Forest Could Help Rebuild Notre-Dame,” Africa, BBC News, October 6, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48964785.
21 Forensic Architecture, The Grenfell Tower Fire, Forensic Architecture (Goldsmiths, University of London, 2018), https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-grenfell-tower-fire.
22 Booth and correspondent, “Grenfell Resident Who Raised Fire Concerns Labelled Troublemaker, Inquiry Told.”
23 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness And Being (Duke University Press, 2016).
24 Sharpe, In the Wake.
25 Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16, no. 4 (2017): 4.
Latest posts by Aadita Chaudhury (see all)
- Chasing Flames: Roving Methodologies and Narratives Towards Future Pyrosocial Worlds - January 14, 2026
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- Fire Vignettes: Fragments from Life and the Field - September 16, 2022