Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Camelia Dewan
(Uppsala University)
Elizabeth Sibilia (University of Oslo)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Nathaniel Millington
(University of Manchester)
- Stream:
- Movement
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 16 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel brings together anthropologists and geographers to discuss how different approaches to toxicity - from looking at how toxic flows circulate and leak through different scales to the lived experiences of toxic entanglements with bodies and the environment - may inform each other.
Long Abstract:
Societal concerns over the 'toxic' have become ubiquitous today as human and environmental entanglements with toxicity, at all scales, are ever-increasing. Things that are toxic pose a risk. When the toxic is contained, the risk is reduced but rarely eradicated as it is moved to a different place. Containing the leaching flows of the toxic across diverse boundaries - from the air, water and soil, to state and basin boundaries - are spatio-temporal in character and produce particular types of spaces and scales. This panel brings together geographers and anthropologists to learn how each of the disciplines are approaching the toxic and toxicity to imagine new theoretical questions and political possibilities. We invite papers that conceptually and methodologically engage with: What are toxic flows? How do political, economic, social, and environmental forces manage these flows, and to what extent do [global] inequalities underpin the lack of toxic containment? How do we research these flows across space and time? What are the different scales at which we engage with questions of toxicity and its movement across land- and waterscapes, through human other-than-human bodies? How does this enable us to assess and understand differing forms of toxicity? From looking at how toxic flows circulate through different scales and spaces, to focusing on the everyday lived experiences of these toxic consequences on health, social reproduction and environmental degradation, this panel seeks to reimagine toxic flows - their containment, leakages and social and material effects- to encourage cross-disciplinary dialogues on these urgent issues.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 16 September, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
Analysis of the multi-scalar (global to micro-geographic) patchiness of releases, flows, and responses to e-waste contaminants. Based on the Palestinian hub that processed the majority of Israel's e-waste for over a decade
Paper long abstract:
The problem of e-waste and the toxicity of e-waste burning has gained broad recognition. But, while imagined as a global problem, oriented along an axis of the Global/South, it occurs overwhelmingly in a few hubs. Our paper draws on our extensive immersive experience within one such hub, a cluster of Palestinian villages that processed most of Israel's e-waste for over a decade. We offer a social and geographic analysis of the remarkable patchiness in the presence and flows of heavy metals released by e-waste processing activities: in where such hubs occur at global and national scales; of where the most hazardous activity of burning of cables for copper extraction occurs in and around these hubs; and in how toxics are dispersed from these burn sites over four orders of magnitude, from kilometers to meters. We also describe the patchiness in the location and purview of the scientific knowledge, legal frameworks, and policies that grapple with the e-waste problem, but falter because of the social cleavages that underlie its radically multi-scalar complexity. Finally, we describe discontinuities and flows in the awareness of toxic hazard in different spaces: our research team's and lay community members' continual grappling with tension between growing awareness of the undeniable extent and consequence of toxics versus daily normalization of this ubiquitous, diffuse and invisible threat; and the schizophrenia of field versus laboratory, where the same matter transforms from common soil to exotic hazardous waste.
Paper short abstract:
This paper theorises the moment when hopes of gaining anthropological knowledge of toxicity through the bodies of interlocutor and observer are disappointed and confused by claims that toxicity remains elsewhere.
Paper long abstract:
In the heat of 2019's scorching Delhi summer, sitting on a bag of dismantled CD-ROM parts (40 rupees a kilo with copper prices in a slump), I observe Shaheed dip PCBs into molten solder to remove a small motor. My face twitches with the fumes, hoping to finally receive an answer, I ask Shaheed whether he is affected by it. "No, I am not."
The proposed paper is based on twelve months of fieldwork, on the peripheries of Delhi, observing relations between informal and formal e-waste dismantling operations. The concern with growing piles of e-waste is fuelled by concerns for toxic flows documented to be traversing the world through nodes of toxic urban wastelands such as Delhi. Yet, the anthropological method poses a challenge to study toxicity, with moments such as the above that promise but disappoint. In this paper I explore the methodological difficulty of following toxicity, while it is always indicated by informants to remain located elsewhere. The above moment highlights how toxicity may be known through the body, but interlocutors' answers are not decodable without already possessed knowledge of standards and research and the observer's own bodily reactions; knowledge that is always about elsewhere. Expectations of gaining access to interlocutor's lived experiences disappoint as workers of urban wastelands consider their own bodies more habituated to toxicity than they expect the observers'. While differential bodily reactions are ascribed to gender, class and ethnic differences. This paper attempts to invert the glances of interlocutors on the anthropologist's body as indicators of lived experience.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses toxic flows of electronic waste recycling and associated health hazards in Delhi. Using three scales of analysis it sheds light on the imperceptibility of toxicity. The social and environmental injustice of the phenomena is addressed through the concept of slow violence.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores toxic flows through health hazards due to electronic waste (E-waste) recycling in Delhi. Conceptualising health hazards as a form of slow violence due to their spatial and temporal qualities, the idea of imperceptibility is put forward. The paper questions what this toxic perceptibility is shaped by. It is structured into three scales of analysis which help to address the perceptibility of health hazards linked to e-waste. First: the micro-biochemical scale shows how, from a toxicological perspective that isolates cause and effect, e-waste results in pathologies and why these are difficult to perceive. Second: the meta-human scale contextualises e-waste as one of many threats the workers are exposed to and recognises the labour as a source of livelihood - making it be perceived as vital, or at least - the lesser evil. Third: the macro socio-legal scale analyses the formalisation of the e-waste recycling process as one that rests on long-term visions informed by national and international narratives. It is argued that while the formalisation process makes the issue of health hazards more visible in some parts of Delhi, the hazardous practices move to other, still invisible spaces. By unpacking the methods of scaling within each chapter, it is illustrated how the scale of perception is a practice/position important to recognise. Finally, attention is drawn to the friction between the scales, to emphasise the tension, and hence the transformative quality of the perception of health hazards linked to e-waste.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the emerging problem of toxic e-waste trades and flows, focusing in particular on recent e-waste health studies in Ghana and China. Theory at the anthropological intersection of toxics biopolitics, and extraction is explored, as are the broader politics of toxic knowledge.
Paper long abstract:
Recent developments in global health studies of toxic electronic waste (e-waste) have exposed new openings for anthropological theory at the frontlines of toxics, extraction, and biopolitics. E-waste disaster in China and Ghana began in the early 2000s and eventually spawned international science and advocacy interest, leading to a variety of solutions-based projects and environmental epidemiological studies. Beginning in 2018, the U.S. National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) even began to offer webinars to report on epidemiological evidence generated from case studies in China and Ghana, and the number of scientific reports emerging around the topic of e-waste and health is on the upswing. These environmental health science projects and data sets are deemed powerful because they produce global toxic e-waste health metrics and promise sound evidence that might inform e-waste management policy, but there exist particular extraction politics amidst these toxic biopolitical programs. Drawing on and comparing toxic e-waste health case studies in Ghana and China, the paper addresses several interlinked questions: What communities and bodies are targeted in global toxic e-waste health studies? What knowledge is extracted from these environments and bodies, and for what purpose? Finally, what is the value of comparative anthropologies of toxic flows for understanding contemporary global e-waste health science and knowledge? These questions, it will be argued, help guide a critical anthropology of toxic flows emerging from global e-waste trades and can ultimately advance theory in the broader anthropology of toxics.