This cutting-edge study traces how chemical exposures are lived, experienced, sensed, and registered, foregrounding new conceptual and methodological approaches in science and technology studies.
Exposure to toxic chemicals has become commonplace, yet the study of both chemicals and toxicity has tended to remain at the margins of the social sciences. This volume addresses the entangled landscape of toxic chemicals in the Anthropocene, drawing together research by anthropologists, geographers, artists, and scholars in science and technology studies. The contributors understand chemical pollution as not simply pervasive, but multiple, situated, unequal, and profoundly relational and affective, traversing temporal and spatial scales as it continuously disrupts and reconfigures the relations between the geological and the human, the political and the material, and the social and natural sciences and humanities. Chemical Exposures explores the accumulation of toxic substances in society, the multiple scales of exposure, and the diverse ways in which exposure can be both sensed and visualized.
Table of Contents
List of contributors
Foreword: M Murphy
Acknowledgements
1 Chemical exposures: accumulation, scale and sensing
Andrew Barry, Sahra Gibbon, Emilie Glazer, and Lucy Sabin
Part I: Accumulation
2 Chemical exposure beyond linear time: Towards a politics of intergenerational responsibility, justice and care Emilie Glazer, Andy Lautrup, and Sahra Gibbon
3 Endemic toxicities and the residues of extraction in Senegal
Noémi Tousignant
4 Living a Good (Enough) Life in a Permanently Polluted World: Grappling with Cumulative Toxicities, Un/Knowns, and Harm Reduction
Tait Mandler and Anita Hardon
Part II: Scale
5 Carbon Omissions: Toward a Toxic Stratigraphy of Northern Chile
Cristobal Bonelli, Damir Galaz-Mandakovic, Valentina Figueroa, Marina Weinberg, and Gabrielle Hecht
6 Universal Contamination: isotopes as material witnesses
Andrew Barry
7 Platinum Exposures: Extraction, exposability and catalysing otherwise
Kate Dawson, Anna Davidson, Bethany Fox
8 Beyond ‘sacrifice’: Suspending damage and situating exposure in Taranto, Italy
Raffaele Ippolito
Part III: Sensing
9 Scientists and pine trees in the midst of carbon, water and energy fluxes
Véra Ehrenstein
10 Toxic land, fertile land: Filming people-soil relationships in the French periphery
Mariana Rios Sandoval
11 Urban pesticides, environmental attitudes, and ‘everyday’ chemical exposure perception
Julia Shaw
12 Re-sensing: Aesthetic tensions of performing pollution in immersive art spaces
Lucy Sabin
Afterword: Elizabeth Roberts