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Paper short abstract

This paper argues that sensory experience and participatory ethnographic methods generate environmental knowledge beyond enumerative science, making the lived effects of chemo-industrial residues and chronic toxicity perceptible even when causal links between pollution and illness remain uncertain.

Paper long abstract

Aliaga is a petrochemical town in Türkiye where residents live under the cumulative toxic burden of three oil refineries and a dense cluster of petrochemical industries. Although the long-term impacts of chemo-industrial production on bodies and ecosystems are increasingly documented, causal links between pollution and chronic illness remain difficult to establish. Scientific uncertainty stems from layered chemical exposures, atmospheric drift, and long temporal delays between exposure and disease, while political constraints include inconsistent environmental monitoring and pressure on public health research and environmental activism. As a result, the health effects of chemo-industrial residues in the region remain unevenly documented and contested.

Drawing on ethnographic research with families in Aliaga, particularly mothers caring for children with asthma, bronchitis, and allergies, this paper examines how residents apprehend and respond to chronic toxicity in the absence of stable scientific evidence. Families track smells, dust, breathing difficulties, and fluctuations in industrial emissions, while adjusting everyday practices of care such as cleaning routines, food sourcing, and strategies for avoiding polluted air.

Building on concepts such as popular epidemiology (Brown 1992) and subaltern science (Van Hollen 2022), the paper explores how sensory experience and everyday observation become forms of environmental knowledge. It further reflects on participatory ethnographic approaches, including sensory ethnography and participatory mapping, as ways to study the residues and lived effects of chemo-industrial processes where their harms remain scientifically indeterminate yet experientially present.