Format/Structure

This panel compiles 4-5 individual paper presentations followed by a Q&A and concluding discussion.

Long Abstract

This panel explores how pollution is known, governed, and lived with in urban environments within the context of an ongoing planetary environmental crisis. Despite its discursive, regulatory, and infrastructural ‘containment’, pollution remains deeply entangled with modern urban life in ways that are unjust, contradictory and increasingly connected with multispecies ecologies. At the same time, scholars are building on critique to evidence, sense, and practice new ways of living with pollution. Indeed, pollution is never a self-evident fact, but something that is produced, made visible, and acted upon in situated, temporally complex, and ambiguous ways. Hence, this session turns to the different ways and new forms in which pollution continually resurfaces—materially, socially, and politically—amid today’s overlapping ecological crises. Combining insights from Political Ecology and Science and Technology Studies, this panel explores polluted urban ecologies and the urban’s ‘ecologies of pollution’; the diverse, partial, and improvisational ways in which pollution is known, lived with and contested. It is guided by, but not limited to, the following themes:

1. Evidencing pollution: Explores different scientific and everyday urban practices that (re)produce specific representations of pollution including counter-methods, embodied, and participatory approaches. What infrastructural responses to pollution emerge from these framings?

2. Uneven exposure: Investigates histories and presents of racial, gendered, and class-based inequality including colonial and capitalist legacies.

3. Multispecies and urban ecologies: Explores impacts of pollution on other-than-human actors and the more-than-human forms of co-existence and politics that emerge.

4. Planetary health: Interrogates the meaning of “health” in polluted urban settings and investigates alternative models of care, support, and multispecies life.

5. Alternative pasts and futures of pollution: How might polluted environments be enacted as archives of socio-ecological history? What new futures come into focus when pollution is lived with as a praxis of care, resistance, etc.?

This Panel has 11 pending paper proposals.
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