Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes the Ergene River in Turkey as a site of slow violence. It explores how pollution turns soil into a "flesh-like" texture, trapping farmers in a toxic agroecology. The river is examined as a toxic agent that actively reshapes material entanglements, rural memory, and daily life.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how industrial pollution in Turkey’s Ergene River has reconfigured human and non-human entanglements, transforming a vital waterway into a site of slow violence. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I analyze the river not merely as a polluted resource but as a toxic agent actively making and undoing the social world. The study traces this transformation through a naturecultural rupture. Initially an archive of loss marked by silenced frogs and vanished fish, the pollution has fundamentally altered the land's ontology. Farmers describe the polluted soil as becoming "flesh-like"—a diseased texture that resists cultivation. Crucially, this material shift traps farmers in a toxic agroecology. To cope with yield losses caused by flesh-like soil and toxic water, farmers are forced to intensify synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use. This creates a vicious cycle where the attempt to sustain life in a dying river deepens dependency on the very industrial logic that poisoned the land. By intertwining the visceral materiality of flesh-like soil with the political ecology of this agrochemical trap, this paper reveals how living with a dying river becomes a complex negotiation between memory, adaptation, and the banality of toxicity.

Keywords: Ergene River, slow violence, flesh-like soil, toxic agroecology, new materialism, Turkey.