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.