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- Convenors:
-
Emily Yates-Doerr
(Oregon State University)
Rebeca Ibañez Martin (Meertens Institute)
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- Discussant:
-
Mariana Rios Sandoval
(Wageningen University)
- Format:
- Closed Panel
Short Abstract:
Feeding and nourishing ourselves can be intoxicating. This panel explores sensorial practices through which people come to know past and present toxins as hazardous and/or enticing. We raise questions about how poison is lived and known to ask how to live with/in while also transforming toxicity.
Long Abstract:
Feeding and nourishing ourselves can be intoxicating. New toxic wastes are found in soils, food, bodies and water systems every day, joining historical pollutants at such a rapid rate that ecologists and toxicologists can't keep up. In this panel, we attune our empirical methods to explore ‘the toxic sensorium’ through which people have historically and currently come to know toxins as hazardous and/or enticing (Chen cited in Stein & Luna 2021). The cases we offer focus on the sensorial practices used to navigate and co-theorize the present-absences of pollution. How do we attend to chemical hazards that might be here and now, but which are also produced and circulated at other points of place and time (the ‘elsewhere and elsewhen’)? How can we work with substances that exceed ecology’s traditional understandings of organisms or systems, while maintaining concern for the ecological entanglements that can nurture or imperil us? Together the papers in this panel raise questions about how toxicity is lived and known through sensorial practice, and how such sensorial practices in turn open space for making and doing social and environmental change. Our collective analysis of how humans and non-humans navigate the chemical milieux and its palimpsestic forms seeks to offer routes to living with/in – and transforming – toxicity.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Sophie Chao (University of Sydney)
Short abstract:
This paper draws on Indigenous philosophies and practices of multispecies relationality to consider what it means to make kin with toxins as lethal, beyond bios others who co-compose plantations as neo-natures, and in the process, alternately make, unmake, and remake more-than-human worlds.
Long abstract:
This paper examines emergent chemo-socialities in the Papuan oil palm plantation sector. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the region, the paper traces the bodily harms wrought by toxic pesticides upon precarious monocrop laborers and the nonhuman beings they are tasked to eradicate: parasites. While bound in an antagonistic relation of killer to killed, both human and other-than-human parties in these capitalist natures find themselves subject to multispecies violence and vulnerability, generated by the shared toxic milieu that they inhabit. The paper draws on Indigenous philosophies and practices of multispecies relationality to consider what it means to make kin with toxins as lethal, beyond bios others who co-compose plantations as neo-natures, and in the process, alternately make, unmake, and remake more-than-human worlds. In particular, it considers how Indigenous plantation workers in West Papua theorize the socio-ecological transformations wrought by plantation proliferation on their sensory, bodily, and affective encounters with non-human beings, the forms of multispecies solidarities that arise in the process, and the political edge that such solidarities accrue in the context of ongoing settler-occupation and capitalist incursion in West Papua. The final part of the paper turns to emergent practices of ritualized, multispecies mourning practiced by Indigenous Papuan laborers, that take as their objects of grief not just the human bodies threatened by toxic ecologies, but also the other-than-human beings seeking to make do within them.
Emily Yates-Doerr (Oregon State University)
Short abstract:
How does toxicity from nuclear fallout settle across generations? This presentation analyzes rumors of red dust that fell upon South Dakota in 1954, exploring how people remember and re-narrate radiation poisoning to reflect on how atomic residue shapes social life in the US Midwest today.
Long abstract:
How does toxicity from nuclear fallout settle across generations? This presentation approaches this question by analyzing rumors of red dust that fell upon South Dakota for three days in 1954, one year before the well-documented “Operation Teapot” series of test explosions occurred a thousand miles away in the southwestern United States. Drawing upon oral histories and archival records of nuclear experimentation, I present a radio-style short story that explores how people remember radiation poisoning within central South Dakota, and how these memories have been retold intergenerationally. The presentation examines technologies of blame and recognition that surround high cancer rates in the region: who is held accountable, and what forms does this accountability take? It also analyzes the medium of rumor to consider what stories about poison cannot be publicly told—for example, stories about families rather than 'corrupt' scientists or neighbors rather than the state. My consideration of how the residue of fallout persists and transforms is the first of a multi-story analysis of how communities have navigated past toxicity toward the present, reflecting on how atomic residue shapes social life today.
Christy Spackman (Arizona State University)
Short abstract:
This paper draws on oral and archival sources to explore how memories of the smell of sugar beet refining shape perceptions of belonging in formerly industrialized agricultural spaces.
Long abstract:
When Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby debuted, art critics pointed to the efficacy of the “problematic and unresolved” nature of Walker’s work. The sugar and polystyrene sculpture highlighted the tangled overlaps found in sugar’s production and consumption. Notably, despite years of idleness, the factory continued to ooze perceptible markers of the environmental toll producing sweetness had left on the site. Yet sugar’s sites of manufacture are rarely evident to the urban dwellers consuming its sweetness in contemporary society. This paper explores how the palimpsestic reminders of sugar produced not from cane, but rather beets in Arizona in the late twentieth century shape community understandings of the environment. Although sugar beet production was commercialized throughout the intermountain west and California by the early 1900s, Arizona’s farmers only began seriously considering sugar beet farming mid-century due to shifts in U.S. agricultural policy. As such, sugar beet refining’s smelly presence entered Arizona’s rural and urban landscapes at a time when an increasing percentage of U.S. citizens were moving away from the perceptible environmental markers of industrial agriculture. At the same time, sugar beet refining “quietly” persists as an overlooked polluter (Baltz 2018). Through a focus on mid- to late-twentieth century encounters with the volatile markers of sugar’s production from beets—a sweet, sulfuric smell—and how those environmental perceptual encounters get remembered or forgotten over decades, this paper explores the way that displeasure and sweetness shape current approaches to making belonging in potentially-toxic places.
Rebeca Ibañez Martin (Meertens Institute)
Short abstract:
Horticultural greenhouses model different ways of growing food & different approaches to working with plants. This paper ethnographically investigates how new cultivation methods give rise to emergent toxic relations. How does the greenhouses shape sociocultural futures of food and chemical futures?
Long abstract:
How is toxicity brought into significance, and how is it made perceptible in specific relations? Social Studies of Science scholars have shown that human bodies do not exist in isolation; there is fluidity between bodies and their environments. This understanding of embodied ecologies becomes even more apparent when considering the chemosphere and the countless ways in which bodies absorb toxicants. Pollutants have become integral parts of human bodies, where pollution is not an out there anymore, but a within. The horticultural greenhouse, a constructed infrastructure that replicates a controlled climatic environment, is an enclosed space where living organisms are cultivated. Beyond being political spaces — spaces of hope as they manage to cultivate crops in otherwise hostile environments — greenhouses model not only different ways of growing food but also different approaches to working with plants. This paper ethnographically investigates how these new cultivation methods give rise to emergent toxic relations. Through a multi-sited ethnography in greenhouses (where workers deal with dermatological complaints and allergic reactions) and with healthcare professionals specialized in work-related issues, this paper asks: What effects is the greenhouse having on toxic relations within and beyond its walls? How are greenhouses not only reshaping the sociocultural futures of food but also the chemosphere?
Terese Gagnon (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Short abstract:
Here, I investigate the role of sensory politics in Indigenous Karen refugees’ discourses about the affects and effects of living with synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides in Mae La refugee camp, located on the Thailand-Myanmar border, amid humanitarian imperatives for "self-reliance."
Long abstract:
In this paper, I investigate the role of sensory politics in Indigenous Karen refugees’ discourses about the affects and effects of living with synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides in Mae La refugee camp. In Mae La, located on the Thai-Myanmar border, gardens have become a means of survival in the wake of what Geographer Elizabeth Dunn calls “humanitarian abandonment” (2017). Such abandonment has been unfolding in the camp since the mid-2000s. In this context, humanitarian imperatives of “self-reliance” necessitate that camp residents sell the produce from their gardens at the camp market to make ends meet. Selling at the camp market prompts gardeners to adopt the use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides which camp gardeners consider to grow vegetables that are “bigger” and “more beautiful” and thus sell better at the market. This is even while many camp residents critique the use of synthetic agricultural inputs as “unhealthy” and the camps as a place where “tasteless” and “old-tasting” food is grown. This is in contrast to the flavorful, healthy, and fresh-tasting foods remembered and recounted from people’s home villages, which they were forced to flee because of war. Sensory critique and refusal take on a darker edge when—exhausted by the imperative to sustain bodily life in the absence of freedom of movement and self-determination—many camp residents choose to take their own lives by ingesting these same herbicides and pesticides.