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- Convenors:
-
Misria Shaik Ali
(IIT Delhi)
Tridibesh Dey (Wageningen University and Research)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
The panel interknits socio-technical experiences and experiments of living with pollution (say, with chemicals, plastics, radioactivity, or caste). This includes emergent everyday practices that subvert and reinvent technological artifacts, knowledge, infrastructures, and social institutions.
Long Abstract:
How are socio-technical configurations, infrastructures, bodies, land and relations altered (Murphy 2017) and/or reinvented in landscapes where pollution is everywhere and nowhere? This panel brings together and interknits everyday experiences of living with pollution and emergent practices thereof, that reinvent technological artifacts, infrastructures, scientific knowledge, and social institutions to agentially subvert their “intended” purposes. Paper proposals can highlight and reflect upon embodied knowledge practices of health and contamination in polluted landscapes garnered through citizen science, community activism and other engaged experiments that actively deconstruct epistemic and procedural injustice of technoscience (Liboiron 2021). Paper interventions can borrow from fields including, but not limited to, environmental humanities and social sciences, discard studies, innovation studies, field philosophy and critical infrastructure studies.
Subversive reinventions may look like marginalized social actors salvaging, repurposing discarded plastic carrier bags and containers to care-fully equip and enact everyday living (Dey 2021; Dey and Michael 2021). Or, farmers around Tummalapalle uranium mine in India who alter the prescribed use of drip irrigation motors, in ways to reduce the distribution of irradiated water onto agricultural fields and contribute to health and food safety (Shaik Ali 2023).
Here, ubiquity is conceptualized with a sensibility for practical situatedness that goes beyond its normative meaning of omnipresence. In this way, the ubiquity of pollution that attracts solutions from everywhere and nowhere embedded in techno-solutionism and scientism like geoengineering or ocean cleanups, are gazed back from situated practices emerging from social and embodied knowledge experiments of living with pollution. We are resisting frameworks that treat pollution as a defiling device unsettling supposedly pure bodies and landscapes. Instead, we welcome research and reflections that analyze how pollution itself is enacted and transformed as it relates with complex socio-technical landscapes, already unsettled (not least by extant relations of caste, gender, religion, race, disability, etc.).
Accepted papers:
Session 1Jack Hensley (Humboldt University in Berlin)
Short abstract:
This paper considers how air pollution is (dis)placed and so defined as a matter of concern when associated with a specific location. Taking Berlin as case study, it shows the air quality problem involves entrenched local-national tensions and practices of identity-making, belonging, and exclusion.
Long abstract:
Literature in science and technology studies (STS) has emphasized the subjective and cultural experience of air pollution beyond chemical exposure and quantitative health risks. Following Mary Douglas’s (1966) concept of dirt – matter out of place – this paper demonstrates the role of location in defining the pollution: it means something that somewhere gets deemed “polluted,” beyond its mere geographical coordinates. I take Berlin as a case for interrogating the entanglement of the city’s identity and notions of belonging and exclusion in the construction of the air quality problem and ensuing political developments. Concerns there about nitrous oxide and particulate matter involve a historical encounter between two place-based cultural imaginaries: Berliner Luft and the German Auto. The drama unfolding after Volkswagen’s dieselgate scandal widened divides between local and national affiliations, as seen in controversies over car-free zoning in the city center and a freeway extension that would purposefully bulldoze some of Berlin’s well-known nightclubs. In Berlin, the rise of citizen science, referencing of more stringent EU and WHO pollution standards compared to national ones to shape policy, and complaints about car traffic can all be seen as ways of asserting local identity through the pollution problem. What is shown is that more than just urban health risks are at stake: whose economy, culture, air, and freedom matters as well.
Angeliki Balayannis (Wageningen University and Research)
Short abstract:
A new science-policy panel for chemicals, waste and pollution is currently being assembled by the United Nations Environment Programme. This paper discusses insights from participation in the process; examining which forms of knowledge (and knowers) have authority, and which come to be marginalised.
Long abstract:
A new science-policy panel for chemicals, waste and pollution is currently being assembled by member states of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). It is due to be established by the end of 2024. Intended to function much like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it is an intergovernmental recognition of the ubiquity of pollution, and an attempt to (re)make pollution as an object of global governance. This moment invites a critical interrogation of both the process of assembling the panel and the broader work of rendering pollution global. Thinking with feminist and anticolonial scholarship, this paper discusses unfolding insights from participation in the panel-building process; it critically attunes to which forms of knowledge (and knowers) have authority, and which come to be marginalised. Furthermore, it considers how marginalised and dominant knowers alike navigate UNEP negotiations and intersessional processes, and what tactics they use to enable interventions. Taking care not to conflate ubiquity with globality, this paper ultimately considers the political implications of approaching pollution as a global problem - and opens up space for experimenting with alternatives.
Misria Shaik Ali (IIT Delhi)
Long abstract:
Tummalapalle, Kudankulam, and Mayapuri are three irradiated sites along India's nuclear fuel cycle. In these three sites, while the safety design features are claimed to effectively contain irradiation, people living around them face health issues. While pollution standards and nuclear safety standards are layered atop each other to ensure effective containment (Shaik Ali 2024), the health standards of the community remains divided (Howey and Naele) and disintegrated from pollution and nuclear governance. That is, despite the increased health ailments in these communities, the health authorities face difficulties in establishing the cause of disease to nuclear operations as they rely on nuclear expertise. With accounts from sensory ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2021, this study advances health-based articulation of pollution's ubiquity rather than those based on nuclear standards. The tensions between health and nuclear governance systems, mediated by pollution control governance authorities provide a critique of expert hegemony in addressing human health, as the paper claims through concepts like radioporosity (Shaik Ali 2023) and layered governance.
STS scholarship has focused on the discursive leakages from the nuclear containment (Kinsella) translating the containment into a techno-scientific imaginary (Kim and Jasanoff). This imaginary provides the epistemological grounds for quantifying overflows from the containment (Burch) than providing a protection-based response to the health affects the overflows cause. This paper calls for a shift from the containment philosophy of pollution regulation towards porosity as the measure for pollution's ubiquity whereby the altered health of residents becomes measures for understanding how chemicals becomes porous.
Angerer, Marie-Luise, Hannah Schmedes and Christian Schwinghammer. n.d. "Technologies of Containment: Ontologies of Porosity, Leakiness and Holding." ZeM. https://www.zem-brandenburg.de/en/projekte/technologies-of-containment-2/
Burch, Karly Ann. 2019. “When Overflow Is the Rule: The Evolution of the Transnational Nuclear Assemblage and Its Technopolitical Tools for Framing Human–Radionuclide Relationality.” Geoforum 107 (December): 66–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.10.011.
Howey, Kirsty, and Timothy Neale. 2022. “Divisible Governance: Making Gas-Fired Futures during Climate Collapse in Northern Australia.” Science, Technology & Human Values 20 (10): 1–30.
Kim, Sang-Hyun and Sheila Jasanoff. 2015. Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. University of Chicago Press.
Kinsella, William J. 2001. “Nuclear Boundaries: Material and Discursive Containment at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.” Science as Culture 10 (2): 163–94.
Shaik Ali, Misria. 2024. "The Alterlife of Disabled Fetal Imaginary," In Medical Technology and the Social, edited by Kate Burrows. Lexington Press.
_______. 2023. “Experiments on Radioporosity: A Response to Decaying Trust at YSR District, Andhra Pradesh.” Centre for 21st Century Studies, May 10. https://www.c21uwm.com/2023/05/10/experiments-on-radioporosity-a-response-to-decaying-trust-at-ysr-district-andhra-pradesh/
Tridibesh Dey (Wageningen University and Research)
Long abstract:
The paper will develop ubiquity as a conceptual lens to describe the aesthetic, practical, and material politics of plastic pollution and cleaning. It will draw on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Ahmedabad, India and will build on waste-picking apprenticeship as an embodied method of spatio-material enquiry and knowledge production. The fieldwork is situated at a time of neoliberal reforms in solid waste management under Prime Minister Modi’s ‘Clean India’ mission. Accompanying Dalit women entrepreneurs who set out on foot in the wee hours of morning, walking opportunistically to pick recyclable plastic discards, the paper will criss-cross different roads, neighbourhoods, class and caste demographics, practices of consumption, discarding, cleaning, tracing altering geographies of plastic waste. These trajectories encounter competition from private waste companies, public policing, entrepreneurial and solidarity networks – ranging between the formal and the informal.
As such, the empirical material brings together different economic and social aspirations, interests, needs, affordances practical improvisation, and innovation at a time of reforms. These conflict and align, unravelling society and cleanliness politics along the lines of class, caste, gender, and so on. In the process, I will both address how the ubiquity of plastic waste is enacted as part of situated social, cultural, economic, spatial, and infrastructural relations, and the different kinds of inventive practices and politics that it leads to.
Em Panetta (York University)
Long abstract:
This project complicates notions of disruption — a momentary crisis of bodily flux — in the context of pollution from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Popularly known as “forever chemicals” due to their bioaccumulative nature, PFAS are hormonally-active pollutants, or Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs). Alongside anticolonial work on toxicants as ongoing settler-colonial infrastructures (Liboiron, 2021; Shadaan & Murphy, 2020), attention to PFAS brings me to ask: How can we conceive of relations with toxicants as simultaneously in-crisis (disruption) and already/indefinitely polluted (forever)? How are these seemingly disparate timescapes produced, and what alternative might help us reckon with our unique relationships to precarity and complicity in our variable chemical kinships (Balayannis & Garnett, 2020)?
I follow scholarly traditions pollution to slow violence (Davis, 2015; Liboiron et al., 2018; Nixon, 2011), joining these conversations with those attending more closely to queer environmentalisms (Ah-King & Hayward, 2013; Di Chiro, 2010) and crip time (Kafer, 2013; Krebs, 2022). I suggest this emerging discourse maintains a reverence to life that animates (Chen, 2012) pollution’s temporality. Then, I consider the implications of instead choosing non-life (Povinelli, 2016; TallBear, 2017) as a temporal underpinning, such that chemical kinships become not simply “experiments of living with pollution,” but of unanxious worldmaking that are not beholden to a biopolitical, or necropolitical, scaffold. With attention to the ways colonialism already doesn’t guarantee “life” as a universal condition, I ultimately suggest Murphy’s alterlife might be amended to alterbeing for our emergent toxic relations “here in the damage now” (2017, p. 501).