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Paper short abstract:

Can decomposed peat, emitting CO2, or a water lily, causing blockages on rivers be deemed dangerous in the Anthropocene? Disrupted natural processes and wetland maintenance practices like mowing intertwine with new policies, knowledge and conflicts, redefining notion of “dirt” and “toxic”.

Paper long abstract:

The Biebrza wetlands (Poland), although drained, remain among Europe's most valuable wild habitats, shaped by centuries of local farming practice – mowing. Climate challenges along with social changes of the Soviet era and capitalist transformation, led to the cessation of the traditional aquatic economy. The Biebrza National Park, established in 1993, crucially regulates mowing to sustain bird populations and aims for water retention and river re-wilding despite local community’s resistance. At the same time, new hydro-biological knowledge highlights the CO2 emissions from drained peatlands, urging rehydration, a daunting task after 200 years of drainage policies. Additionally agricultural runoff and mowed biomass introduce biogens, causing algae overgrowth, eutrophication, and hypoxia in the Biebrza river. Paradoxically in the Anthropocene, the natural processes accelerated and imbalanced by climate change and human activity started to be considered as unwanted and dangerous, challenging the definition of what is toxic, dirty, and aesthetic. The yellow water lily embodies this paradox—simultaneously admired and labeled as “dirt” to be mowed. The lily is as much a graceful non-human inhabitant of the river, as it is a marker of: conflict; local memory and perception of the river and ecological instability. Viewing water as a trance-substance that permeates local and institutional aesthetics, values, and environmental care strategies, as well as conflicts related to the peatland and river “management”, prompts reflection on the land-centrism of thinking about the wetlands. Simple eco-technologies, such as underwater cameras, provide a different perspective, revealing the multidimensionality of the Biebrza waterscape with its "above" and "below”.

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Paper short abstract:

Amidst western Canada’s increasingly devastating wildfires, kinship offers unique means of grasping and responding to the climate crisis. Emergent forms of care that kin-based elemental intimacies suggest are unsettled by settler-colonial histories – but inspire decolonial alternatives in turn.

Paper long abstract:

In 2023, Canada experienced its worst-ever wildfire season: over 18.5 million hectares of forest burned. As the scale, devastation, and potential long-term effects of wildfire begin to outstrip the imagination, different frameworks for relating and responding to it become imperative.

Taking inspiration from the etymology of 'ecology' – from the Greek 'oikos', for house – this paper suggests that kinship offers rare means of grasping the otherwise-ungraspable phenomena of the climate crisis, and a repertoire of ethics, stories, and practices of care that Canadians repurpose in re-learning how to live with wildfire. Kinship shares vast scales of time and space with the climate crisis: family is an intergenerational undertaking, continuously reworking its histories to generate alternative futures, routinely stretched across global geographies in its mobilities and imaginations. Kinship encompasses competing obligations of care that entangle past and future generations with the land that nourishes them; and it situates crises of global magnitude in everyday practice and our most intimate relations (Reece 2022). Kinship practice has played a crucial role in the settlement of Canada as a settler colony, too: the ways settler and migrant families have claimed, worked, and dwelled on the land have driven the climate crisis, unsettling the inventive potentials of kin-based elemental intimacies. But as wildfire demands and enables new ways of seeing, knowing, and relating to and through the land, it is often in the register of kinship that experimental responses are pursued – opening new possibilities for decolonizing these historical relations in turn.

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Paper short abstract:

Air, vital for life, is often polluted. Clean energy efforts to reduce pollution from cooking fuels are often overlooked by people engaged in such practices. I concentrate on breath to offer a distinct lens and explore how people in Langas (Kenya) perceive air pollution as a distant issue.

Paper long abstract:

Choy (2012) defines air as the "thing that is nothing", owing to its elusive nature. Paradoxically, air serves as the carrier of life's most essential element, oxygen. 99% of the global population breathes air being laden with substances that are detrimental to health (WHO, 2023). Air becomes visible only through encounters with tangible elements (smoke, dust, odours) and its elusive nature has historically led to the neglect of air pollution by both academics and affected communities.

This paper ethnographically explores how people of Langas, a Kenyan informal settlement, experience and perceive air pollution. Clean energy interventions, like LPG gas bottles, have been prioritized to mitigate pollution from cooking with traditional fuels (firewood, charcoal, kerosene). Nonetheless, air pollution remains a distant concern for communities, often attributed to external sources rather than domestic energy practices. The health effects of combusting polluting fuels are protracted in time and challenging to witness for those exposed daily. Resulting cardiovascular and respiratory diseases lack a discernible cause and count as “wicked illnesses” (Yates-Doerr, 2020).

This paper focuses on breath—the most universal of human experiences (Oxley & Russell, 2020)—as an entry point to examine how air pollution is perceived and experienced through inhaling and exhaling. The effects of air pollution on breath (coughing, wheezing, sense of suffocation) constitute the "experiential meanings" (Bourdieu, 1990), shaping individuals' understanding of health, pollution, and danger. This novel approach unveils the intricate biosocial interactions between people and air pollution, offering a tangible perspective on an otherwise elusive but concerning issue.

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Paper short abstract:

In this position piece, I build on insights from the documentary film All That Breathes (2022) alongside autoethnographic notes to bring attention to conditions governing breath/ability amidst more-than-human biosocial intimacies across two Indian cities.

Paper long abstract:

Breathing forms an experiential field through which intimacies between life forms, objects, and things are exchanged, and yet, such intimacies are always already subjected to—through the implication of air—the (biopolitical) mechanisms that render some forms of breath more viable versus others. In this position piece, I bring attention to the conditions governing breathability amidst more-than-human biosocial encounters across two Indian cities. I think through Shaunak Sen’s documentary film All That Breathes (2022)-a provocative deployment of the metaphor of breath to delve into the experience of attunement to air (through religious-ethical practices of caring and attending) in the city of Delhi, India among humans/non-humans. Their exploration unveils political formulations through which the air in Delhi, India becomes increasingly unbreathable due to anthropogenic climate change entwined with racialisations that evince some expressions of breath as more quixotic. Moving ahead, I integrate propositions of prepositional breath (Tremblay, 2022) through autoethnographic notes of a queer life lived in the city of Kolkata, India by sharing memories, instances, and incidents that propelled my sense of sharing breathable milieus capable of sustaining collective breath amidst not-so-convivial hetero-patriarchal power relations. Through this, I argue that attention to breath allows for the interrogation of more-than-human intimacies that simultaneously succor and disrupt normative processes that frame the urban as an anthropocentric orientation (Ruddick, 2015), an orientation that insinuates impossibilities of breath through racialised processes fabricating and perpetuating breathless/ness for some over others.

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Paper short abstract:

This contribution seeks, without rejecting it, to go beyond a binary 'toxic-clean' vision by paying particular attention to the sensitive and intimate.

Paper long abstract:

We've been surrounded by air since we were born, and it's what makes us exist. Yet the evidence of its presence and its invisibility sometimes lead us to forget about it (Irigaray, 1981). Frequently approached in quantitative terms (Chiarini, et al., 2020), studies of air often seek to assess its cleanliness or toxicity. This quantified viewpoint, toxic or clean, gives us a grip on this invisible element, which is often considered immaterial. This contribution seeks, without rejecting it, to go beyond a binary 'toxic-clean' vision by paying particular attention to the sensitive and intimate.

The aim here is to present the results of an ongoing anthropological study into the sensitive and affective experiences of air in the cities of Liège (Belgium) and Marseille (France). Through an artistic mediation system based on the creation of sensitive maps (Olmedo, 2016), air is approached on a microscopic, intimate and phenomenological scale. Urban dwellers are invited to reflect on and share the way in which they experience their daily atmospheric environment, as well as all the other elements that are interrelated with it. The aim is to take a sensitive approach to air, without isolating it, and to highlight concrete attachments and practices, as well as the way in which the notions of toxicity and purity, used by the players, underline particular representations of air.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the impact of new methods in sensing and addressing plastic pollution. It discusses interdisciplinary approaches like 'plastic fall' forecasts and the concept of toxic heritage, with a focus on fieldwork in the Randstad region, Netherlands.

Paper long abstract:

This paper scrutinizes the relationship between new ways of sensing and grasping plastic materiality on the one hand and the limitations of initiatives to foster a sense of care, responsibility and curbs to plastic pollution. The sheer extent and ubiquity of micro and nano plastics in the atmosphere and ecosystems constitute a hyperobject with which disciplines are now grappling. Interdisciplinary efforts to measure and grasp synthetic plastic and its inhaling and ingesting, such as ‘plastic fall’ weather forecasts, have recently been introduced. This paper considers the forsaking of toxic materialities that normally happens by promoting tradition as heritage over and above modern waste as non-heritage, as modernity’s marginalised toxic heritage, and how recent methods and approaches attuning to this condition make us aware of a petrochemical colonisation of the body and foster an ethics of care regarding the plastic materiality we inhabit. It draws on local responses to plastic materiality in the Randstad region of the Netherlands and develops a fieldwork approach in this context addressing the need for community collaboration and an interdisciplinary and multi-level ecological sensing of synthetic plastics in contemporary life.

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Paper short abstract:

Pharmaceuticals may heal humans, but become toxic downstream. Where is this problem tackled—in wastewater treatment plants, or upstream in hospitals, houses or labs? We trace what ‘cleaning’ is in different sites where the ecotoxicity of pharmaceuticals becomes a matter of concern.

Paper long abstract:

While pharmaceuticals combat diseases in human bodies, when they are peed out and travel downstream, they become toxic to aquatic life.

This article traces attempts at cleaning pharmaceuticals from water downstream to upstream, from wastewater treatment plants to doctor’s practices and pharmaceutical labs. Based on multi-sited ethnography in the Netherlands, we attend to how ‘cleaning’ becomes different things at different points of the stream. In wastewater treatment, cleaning is a matter of 'removing' through one technology or another, although ‘removal’ also displaces the matter into air or soil. For doctors, cleaning is primarily about 'prevention' or 'moderation', prescribing less while simultaneously attending to the needs of the individual patient. In pharmaceutical research, cleaning is about '(re)designing' a compound that has the ability to clean itself away by breaking down, but it also needs to work well in the body.

By contrasting various cleaning arrangements, the article aims to challenge the idea of cleaning as a linear process, as the 'removal' of a material that happens to be there, objectively present. Instead, we resituate 'cleaning' in a web of folded practices—removing, preventing, (re)designing—each of which comes with its own politics and clashing ‘goods.’ We propose that for an anthropology in a toxic world, it is essential to foster attention to where problems to do with toxic inheritances are tackled and what the political limitations and affordances of these ‘wheres’ are.

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Paper short abstract:

Dutch firefighting is both ‘gevaarlijk’ (‘dangerous’) and ‘veilig’ (safe). Rather than opposite ends of a single register, this pair has a much more complicated link in this practice. Our ethnographic findings play with common tropes to describe 'clean' and 'toxic' through.

Paper long abstract:

We set out to learn about how toxicity is dealt with in Dutch firefighting. This, it turns out, is both ‘gevaarlijk’ (‘dangerous’) and ‘veilig’ (safe) – a surprise to us, who naively assumed that these terms present opposite ends of a single register. But as firefighters perform ‘veiligheid’ not as the property of a situation but rather as a constant practice, they articulate a much more complicated link between danger and safety. In firefighting, danger and safety emerge tightly together – and not as two extremes that overcome each other. Rather, one begets the other and makes it necessary. ‘Gevaar’ needs to be performed so firefighters can be ‘veilig’: most accidents occur in situations where there is little danger. This link, however, must be performed well: in the face of mounting danger, safety practice can still fail, as in the case of a firefighter who feels unsafe with her current team, and fears things may go wrong when danger looms. Meanwhile, which ‘gevaar’ is mounting is not trivial: shifting measurements mean shifting dangers; as ‘danger’ morphs, so does what is done with it. All this to say: rather than opposite ends of a register, ‘gevaar’ and ‘veiligheid’ seem caught in each other. Sounds complex? That is because this case may stretch what is possible to articulate in the common terms, logics, tropes to describe ‘clean’ or ‘toxic’ through. So this is what we come to present: some blazing-hot complexities of valuing in firefighting practice.

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How do people live their lives in landscapes and soil that are contaminated with lethal wastes of war? This paper i) develops the notion of 'guerrilla demining’ as a material and ethical practice of ‘freeing the soil’, and ii) explores its relationship to political practices of freedom.

Paper long abstract:

Wars create and leave behind ‘deadly environments’ (Henig 2020) contaminated with radioactive, toxic, explosive remains, thereby violently reconfiguring relations between people and the natural elements such as the air, soil, and water. These wastes of war thus engender new biosocial, geosocial, and chemosocial entanglements and practices. Drawing on my long-term research of explosive war remnants (landmines) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I ask how people live their lives in landscapes and soil that are contaminated with lethal wastes of war, and in a situation in which humanitarian demining efforts have been largely halted.

In this presentation, I follow several individuals who have engaged in what I term ‘guerrilla demining’ – grassroots, unsystematic but sustained efforts to monitor contamination and clear explosive war remains from the soil that are beyond the purview of the state. Guerrilla demining requires a deep localised knowledge of the soil and the terrain, of the explosives, as much as a deep sense of care with regard to making life possible in deadly environments. Following the panel’s call, I will reflect on the relationship between ‘guerrilla demining’ as transformative practices of ‘freeing the soil’ and political practices of freedom for those who are engaged in these activities. In conclusion, I will speculate in the spirit of David Greaber’s anarchist anthropology: If there is ‘no escaping the toxic world’ (Nading 2020, 209), can acts of ‘freeing the soil’ become generative for ‘acting as if one is already free’ (Graeber)?