2023
3rd November 2023, Hugh Raffles
Seminar with Prof Hugh Raffles from the New School, for a conversation about his recent "Book of Unconformities".
28th April 2023 Unnoticing and ignorance of risk
A conversation, chaired by Cecile Kramer, with Dr Loretta Lou from Durham University, about her article: "LOU, L. I. T. The art of unnoticing". American Ethnologist, published online.
ABSTRACT In China many petrochemical plants are adjacent to residential areas. Despite this, the people who live in these areas appear indifferent to the threat of toxic pollution and chemical explosions, even though they are aware of the danger. Building on historical and social studies of ignorance, I show how residents in a southern Chinese city live with the threat of petrochemicals by practicing what I call the “art of unnoticing,” a contrived form of ignorance that enables them to live with the reality of pollution and reclaim their agency in face of the unavoidable. In light of this, I reflect on the limit and complexity of the global environmental justice when willful ignorance is at work. The next step forward is to understand what it is that people are unnoticing, as well as what unnoticing can do to people's lifeworlds.
29th March 2023, Residual unprotection
A conversation, chaired by Ruth Prince, with Dr Noemi Tousignant from UCL, about her 2022 article: "Residual unprotection: aflatoxin research and regulation in Senegal's postcolonial peanut infrastructures (Globalizations)".
Abstract: In the early 1960s, a potentially carcinogenic substance, aflatoxin, was identified in peanuts. In this article, I explore how aflatoxin was known – and unknown – through and for the infrastructures designed, from the late nineteenth century, to stimulate and support peanut farming in Senegal. Anticipated European standards stimulated a narrow field of knowledge and know-how oriented towards control-for-export, bypassing Senegalese farms, food, and bodies. Investigations of aflatoxin’s carcinogenicity were actively suppressed, challenged, and silenced. That (post)colonial infrastructures supported peanuts as an export cash crop and a target of European regulation – but not as part of local ecologies and foodways – mattered for how they were deemed (not) worth knowing as potentially contaminated and carcinogenic from the 1960s. I develop the notion of residual unprotection to highlight how the enduring effects of colonial infrastructures distributed (through regulatory gaps) and obscured (through non-knowledge) the potential harmfulness of aflatoxin in Senegal.
19th April 2023 What counts as evidence?
A conversation, chaired by Daniel Münster, with Dr R.K.Sony (Ashoka Trust) about the article:
Sony, R. K.; Münster, Daniel; Krishnan, Siddhartha (2022): What counts as evidence? Examining the controversy over pesticide exposure and etiology in an environmental justice movement in Kerala, India. In Environmental Sociology, pp. 1–17.
ABSTRACT: Scientific evidence and knowledge are central to movements for environmental justice. Cases of pesticide toxicity have often led to the emergence of controversies around the nature of evidence and its causal connection to observed pathologies. Toxic effects depend on multiple, situated socioecological conditions such as time and place, duration, and mode of administration, making quantifiable etiology tenuous. Research on toxic exposure issues has shown limitations of regulatory sciences in establishing causality and argued for bringing various ways of knowing to understand, acknowledge and act against harms due to exposure. This article draws on sociological research carried out in northern Kerala, where continued use of the insecticide endosulfan between 1977 and 2000 has had significant health impacts on farmworkers and the general population.
2022
2nd March 2022 Protesting pollution
Readings:
BOND, D. (2021). "Contamination in theory and protest." American Ethnologist 48(4): 386-403.
And some shorter blogposts:
https://medanthroquarterly.org/critical-care/2020/11/understanding-pfoa/
2nd February 2022 Polluted archaeologies
Readings:
Stewart, H. (2017). Toxic landscape: Excavating a polluted world. Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 32(2): 25-37. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.23660
Petursdottir, Th. (2020). Anticipated futures? Knowing the heritage of drift matter. International Journal of Heritage Studies 26(1): 87–103. doi: 10.1080/13527258.2019.1620835.
2021
1st November 2021 Toxic sensorium
Readings:
Fisher, J., M. Mostafanezhad, et al. (2021). Introduction: Pollution and Toxicity: Cultivating Ecological Practices for Troubled Times. Environment and Society 12(1): 1-4.
Stein, S. and J. Luna (2021). Toxic Sensorium: Agrochemicals in the African Anthropocene. Environment and Society 12(1): 87-107.
5th October 2021 Pollution is colonialism
Readings:
Liboiron, M. (2021). Pollution is colonialism. Durham, Duke UP.
18th August 2021 Toxic bodies
Agard-Jones, V. (2013). "Bodies in the System." Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 17(3 (42)): 182-192.
Dewan, C. (2021). Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh. Seattle, University of Washington Press.
21st May 2021 Disability and environmental humanities
Readings:
Voyles, Traci Brynne. 2017. The Invalid Sea: Disability Studies and Environmental Justice History. In: Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory, edited by Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara, 448. UNP - Nebraska.
20th April 2021 Toxic science
Readings:
Shannon Cram (2010): Escaping S-102: Waste, Illness, and the Politics of Not Knowing. International Journal of Science in Society
Kate Brown (2017): Blinkered science: why we know so little about Chernobyl’s health effects. Culture, Theory and Critique
16th March 2021 Not/Knowing
Readings:
Shannon Cram (2010): Escaping S-102: Waste, Illness, and the Politics of Not Knowing. International Journal of Science in Society
Kate Brown (2017): Blinkered science: why we know so little about Chernobyl’s health effects. Culture, Theory and Critique
16th February 2021 Soils
Readings:
Camelia Dewan; Impure Foods: Entanglements of Soil, Food, and Human Health in Bangladesh. Gastronomica 1 February 2019; 19 (1): 99–102.
Blogs by Munster & Munster
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/pharmaceutical-care-diclofenac-a-pharmacon-of-more-than-human-health
20th January 2021 Animals
Readings:
Blanchette, A. (2019). "Living Waste and the Labor of Toxic Health on American Factory Farms." Med Anthropol Q 33(1): 80-100.
Supplementary text: Brown, H. and A. M. Nading (2019). "Introduction: Human Animal Health in Medical Anthropology." Med Anthropol Q 33(1): 5-23.
2020
9th December 2020 Foods and bodies
Readings:
Lock, M. (2018). Mutable environments and permeable human bodies. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 24(3): 449-474.
Solomon, H. (2016). Metabolic Living. Food, Fat, and the Absorption of Illness in India. Durham, Duke UP.
11th November 2020 Chemical infrastructure
Readings:
Nading, A. M. (2017). "Local Biologies, Leaky Things, and the Chemical Infrastructure of Global Health." Medical Anthropology 36(2): 141-156.
Nading, A. M. (2020). "Living in a Toxic World." Annual Review of Anthropology 49(1): 209-224.
14th October 2020 Toxicology
Readings:
Carson, R. (1962) Silent Spring. New York Houghton Miflin (First three chapters)
Tousignant, N. (2017). Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal. Durham, Duke University Press. (Introduction and Chapter 3)
20th May 2020 Epidemiology
Readings:
Susanne Bauer, 2018, Radiation Science after the Cold War. The Politics of Measurement, Risk and Compensation in Kazakhstan.
Suzana Sawyer, 2015, Crude Contamination: Law, Science and Indeterminacy in Ecuador and Beyond, in Appel, Mason and Watts (eds) Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas.
18th March 2020 Impurity - Toxic Politics
19th February 2020 Against purity
Shotwell, A. (2018). Against Purity. Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.