Paper short abstract:

I deconstruct toxicity through a comparison between an epidemiological approach to pollutants and their lived experience. An ethnographic analysis of toxicity in Taranto illustrates the complexity of temporal scales through which chemicals contribute to new biological, political and moral orders.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses the lived experience of toxicity and its relationship to the environmentalist resignation of a community living in one of the most polluted Italian cities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the focus of this paper are the conflicting moral nuances that emerge at the intersection between epidemiology and the lived experience of toxicity in Taranto. Embedded within public discourse in the city, pollutants flow beyond the epidemiological scale of the environmental disaster and are re-evaluated according to the lived experience of the community. I will first focus on the dissonance between asbestos (banned in 1992) and dioxin to explain how the experience of the former in the earlier phase of the industry deeply shaped the community's understanding of the latter in the present. Over three decades, long-term exposure to asbestos produced a politics of indifference toward all toxic substances on behalf of the earlier generations of workers. This contributes to a low participation in the environmental movement on behalf of the wider community.

The second part of the paper will describe the implications of Taranto's experience of asbestos in the moral life of the community. The context-specific experience of asbestos-related disease, in combination to a well-established compensation system and an ongoing trial for environmental disaster, leads to an experience of death as the systematic monetization of human life. Understanding how different toxicities are co-produced within these narratives is of primary relevance in dissecting the forms of political resignation that the workers and their social circles engage with.

Paper short abstract:

This paper employs my ethnography of Irish Travellers living in an extra-legal camp in South East London, to examine pollution from the perspective of its ritual efficacy and its intrinsic materiality. The paper also considers Moran-Thomas' notion of 'para-communicable' conditions.

Paper long abstract:

The emergent qualities of toxic human-environmental relations frame much contemporary anthropological and geographical thought. From the molecular ecologies of Indian megacities to enactments of infrastructural violence in central London, toxic attachments constitute human and nonhuman relations across multiple scales. Pollution, bodies and boundaries are already commonly used framing devices in both classic and contemporary scholarship on Travellers and Gypsies. The aim of this paper is to employ my ethnography of Irish Travellers living in an extra-legal camp in South East London, to examine each of these framings.

It will demonstrate that dirt and pollution represent far more than the symbolic sentinels of order which patrol the borders of Travellers' moral cosmology, as previous scholarship influenced by Mary Douglas contended. Instead, I argue that Travellers have developed what Kath Weston terms 'toxicity infused attachments' to the environments in which they live (2017). From this perspective, the pollution that flows from truck exhausts and the chimneys of cement manufacturing plants, into Traveller bodies, not only causes illness, but creates a paradoxical situation where caregiving, as well as the intimate family bonds this produces, are intensified.

The paper concludes by considering Amy Moran-Thomas' notion of 'para-communicable' conditions (2019); a category that unsettles the boundaries between infectious and non-transmittable disease, to enquire whether the co-constitutional involvement of industrial toxins and Travellers' bodies cross the threshold of what are conventionally classified as non-transmittable conditions.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is an exploration of life, labor and suffering around the fringes of Marseille's Étang-de-Berre, among Europe's most profoundly contaminated zones. The paper considers the patterning of Roma informal site selection and refugee resettlement in connection with chemical exposure.

Paper long abstract:

This project looks at the life and experience of racism in the epicenter of one Europe's most toxic zones, a vast and poisoned maritime lagoon. It looks at quiet and destructive chemical modalities of racial harm that are themselves tied up with poverty and property value. The paper in particular considers exposure-as-harm enacted through (1) property prices, and thereby attractiveness for refugee resettlement; and (2) the presence of poisoned land that is thus unclaimed, undesirable, and rendered available for informal migrant Romani occupation. While participatory mapping techniques shed light on proximity to toxic sites correlated with poverty and identity, a second but equally important focus emphasizes narratives of betrayal, exposure, and social (dis)trust as embodied in landscape and choicelessness. The Étang-de-Berre, fringed by the region's refineries and chemical plants, with 40 Seveso Sites, is a disease cluster: cancers at 300% of the national rate, and many babies born armless; it features populations uneasy with and vocal about pollutive capital, but with unequal access to machineries of grievance and protest. Poisons taint the foodways. In this examination of already-precarious groups' experiences and narratives of chemical exposure in this tired and ravaged but storied wasteland, I correlate emotive phenomenologies with bodily and ecological realities of life-and-death consequence. I will have been in the area conducting research, including with NSF funds and as the commissioning co-director of a major international museum project on Roma, for the academic year, and I have been working on/in the region periodically for nearly a decade.

Paper short abstract:

Toxic flows can leave a landscape uninhabitable resulting in residential relocation programs known as buyouts. Examining three U.S. cases, we consider how commemoration offers an opportunity to recreate community and belonging to a place that no longer physically exists due to contamination.

Paper long abstract:

Categorized as technological disasters, toxins leached into the environment often render landscapes uninhabitable due to the high-risks associated with chronic exposure to toxic chemicals. The flow of toxins across landscapes and waterscapes can trigger a secondary movement; specifically, the relocation of residents and demolition of the built environment through buyout programs. When places are erased from the landscape, commemoration offers the opportunity for displaced residents to remember their former homes and neighbors while processing the associated trauma from displacement. Yet not all commemorative artifacts aid in this healing process. This research examines the lived experience of relocated residents as expressed in commemorative artifacts at various scales—from the individual, to the impacted community, to those beyond community boundaries. Drawing on three cases, each awarded buyouts due to toxic disasters in the United States, we examine the experiences of Treece, Kansas; Times Beach, Missouri; and Ponca City, Oklahoma. Through these three sites, we analyze how each commemorative artifact recreates community and a sense of belonging to a place that no longer exists physically on the landscape while also considering whose narratives are included or ignored and the way in which fault is attributed to responsible entities or social systems.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at toxic flows on a micro-scale, exploring the circulation of agricultural pesticides between agrochemical dealers, smallholder farmers, bodies and the environment in western Kenya, describing their everyday lived experiences in the wider context of a postcolonial political economy.

Paper long abstract:

The use of pesticides in agriculture is widespread. The introduction of pesticides is associated with higher crop yields and less vulnerability to crop failure, and therefore seen as an important strategy to achieve food security worldwide, and particularly in developing countries. However, there are increasing concerns about links between the use of agricultural pesticides and various detrimental effects on human health and the environment. For smallholder farmers in western Kenya, agricultural pesticides are increasingly a means to contain different threats to their crops exacerbated by climate change and global trade. Their practices of pesticide use involve toxic flows on a micro-scale, from agrochemical dealers to users, and from users to bodies and the environment. This paper examines local networks of pesticide distribution and use, and notes the concerns and views of farmers, families and agrochemical dealers in a small village and the surrounding area. Based on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2019, it looks at the everyday lived experiences of selling, buying and applying pesticides in the context of subsistence farming, and how these are tied to market forces, economic practices and the realities of government actors. Particular attention will be paid to interacting social and environmental conditions and syndemic effects that shape the circulation of substances, pollution, environmentalism, global health, risk and violence in a postcolonial political economy.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how a virus that emanates from Atlantic salmon farms in coastal British Columbia can reveal global geographies of aquaculture within the bodies and blood cells of fish, and further asks how viral ecologies contribute to newly emerging toxic geographies of settler-colonialism.

Paper long abstract:

In the coastal waters of British Columbia (BC), the origin, spread, and threat of Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV), a virus that spreads rapidly among fish in open-net farms of Atlantic salmon, has become embroiled within the protection of Indigenous rights and territories and has stoked anxieties around the ambiguous geographical circulation of viral discharge. The virus travels through ocean currents, tides, and the movements of fish, people, and water, and since Atlantic salmon farms in BC are located on Pacific salmon migration routes, concerns over inter-species transfer of the virus are particularly pronounced. The "blue revolution" of farm-raised seafood is complicated when salmon become at risk of ruptured blood cells and organ damage, and such signs of PRV are found far from farm locations. In this paper, I ask how attention to PRV makes global geographies of aquaculture visible in the bodies and blood cells of fish. I describe how, amidst tense state and scientific calibrations that struggle to determine the pathogenicity of PRV, the feral effects of industrialized aquaculture, such as the proliferation of novel viruses, can accentuate settler-colonial dispossession in ways that continue to unfold beyond the boundaries of farms. Moreover, I look to the lives and bodies of salmon to consider how the expanding PRV footprint might transform salmon migration routes and contribute to newly emerging toxic geographies of settler-colonialism. I hope to provide space for the bodies of salmon to tell stories of livability, encounter, and colonial entanglement in a watery borderland between settler-states.