Introduction to special issue: “Scaled ethnographies of toxic flows”

Abstract

Societal concerns over ‘toxic’ substances have become ubiquitous as human and more-than-human entanglements with toxicity are ever-increasing; people are now living in a ‘permanently polluted world’. Ethnographies that focus specifically on making visible the uneven geographies of ‘toxic flows’ expand interdisciplinary research on the spatialization of a ‘toxic’ politics. By highlighting the structural inequalities of poisonous exposure in everyday life, the papers in this edited collection underscore the dynamic material conditions and interrelations of toxicity inherent in the global ‘frictions’ of late-stage capitalism. Focusing on embodied experiences of toxic exposure in differentiated landscapes among working-class peoples, scheduled castes, ethnic minorities and other-than-human populations, the articles in this themed issue use ‘toxic’ with ‘flows’ as a spatial and conceptual framework to reframe and challenge ideas of the political. The spatial politics of seeking to contain flows of toxic substances are fraught in tensions in ways that may open up possibilities for, as well as limit, political agency. Here, we recognize both intimate activism and individual coping strategies as well as how resignation and denial of toxic effects may thwart efforts of political mobilization while operating to naturalize the violence of toxicity. The ethnographies in this special issue help to visualize and reconceptualize geographies of structural inequalities while they also offer glimpses of what non-toxic geographies might look like.

Introducing toxic flows

Societal concerns over toxic substances have become ubiquitous as human and other-than-human entanglements with toxicity are ever-increasing; people are now living in a ‘permanently polluted world’ (Liboiron et al., 2018). Ethnographies of ‘slow observation’ highlight the ways in which people make and remake their lives over time (Davies, 2018, 2021; Vorbrugg, 2019). This often involves different strategies to live with the porous entanglements with anthropogenic pollution (Roberts, 2017). While environmental activists may harness toxic biographies to provide guerilla narratives against corporate pollution (Armiero et al., 2019), others engage in hypo-interventions and intimate activism in toxic environments (Tironi, 2018). Communities facing political constraints may also engage in ‘resigned activism’ (Lora-Wainwright, 2017) and ‘the arts of unnoticing’ and ‘contrived ignorance’ (Lou, 2022) that in return may result in the ‘denunciation’(Fiske, 2018), ‘dissociation’ (Ahmann, 2024) or ‘disavowal’ (Fortun, 2014) of living with pollution and its potential harms. Such distancing from the effects of toxic exposure is linked to the temporalities of pollution as ‘slow violence’, i.e. ‘violence that occurs gradually and out-of-sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (Nixon, 2011:2). Nixon’s concept of slow violence is foundational in social science research on toxicity, but as geographer Thom Davies (2019) encourages scholars researching toxic geographies to ask: for whom is this violence ‘out-of-sight’?

This special issue on “Scaled Ethnographies of Toxic Flows” draws on Davies’ probe ‘out-of-sight-to-whom?’ to illustrate how slow violence is not out-of-sight to the people it impacts (Davies, 2019). Collectively, the papers examine the extent to which politics and power structures make, remake, and sustain geographies of pollution (Davies, 2018) and how material entanglements with toxic substances are connected to global politics (Agard-Jones, 2013) and power geometries of time-space (Massey, 1999). While flows of commodities, people, and capital have been described since the 1990s globalization debates as circulating seamlessly and smoothly, global connections in fact often encounter ‘friction’ through awkward, unequal, and unstable qualities of interconnection across difference (Tsing, 2005: 6). Indeed, recent research on logistics show how “calculative logic and spatial practices of circulation” have always been turbulent and characterized by struggle: contested and challenged by workers long exploited by these structures (Chua et al., 2018; Cowen, 2014). With ‘toxic flows’ we want to emphasize how pollution can be seen as a material element of such ‘friction’ and examine the different ways in which such pollution is recognized, experienced, represented, and regulated in diverse contexts.

Through multi-scaled ethnographic examinations of embodied experiences of toxic exposure among marginalized groups (working classes/castes, ethnic minorities, and fish-human ecologies under settler colonialism), the articles collectively reframe and challenge ideas of the political. The political also includes personal denial of toxic effects that thwart efforts of political mobilization and naturalize the violence of toxic exposure, thereby embedding it in structures of power. Thus, the collection of ethnographies locates a dynamic ‘toxic’ politics at the scale of everyday life and embodied experiences, as well as within the realm of scientific knowledge production and state regulation. Scaled ethnographies that trace diverse toxic flows help us link micro-level accounts of pollution to the macro-level political economic structures that enable polluting activities of e-waste recycling, toxic ship recycling, and industrial pollution in both in the Global North and South. The authors use different notions of toxic, flows, and scale to push understandings of the spatio-temporality of unequal distribution of harm from pollution (Shadaan and Murphy, 2020) and thereby problematise the political implications of living in a ‘permanently polluted world’ (Liboiron et al., 2018). By highlighting the materiality of toxic flows and its leakages in peripheral spaces, this special issue illustrates how particular interests economically benefit from maintaining flows of toxic matter, keeping them and their delayed health effects ‘out-of-sight’. Such discussions of different bodily politics and representations of toxic harm helps to uncover the power dynamics that actively produce some places (and some bodies) as more toxic/‘naturally exposed’ than others (Perczel, 2023) and underscore how and at what scale toxic matter flows and seeps even in efforts to contain (Dewan and Sibilia, 2023). Such slow violence is both visible and bodily experienced for those human and other-than-human populations who face toxic exposure daily (Evans, 2022; Garb and Leblond, 2023).

Scaled ethnographies of toxic flows take seriously local knowledge claims regarding pollution while offering a novel approach to theorize and render visible geographies of inequalities (Davies, 2018). They draw attention to how living with pollution for particular communities constitutes social injustice in the form of ‘structural violence’ where violence, as reduced life expectancy, is built into power relations and is not even conceived of as violence at all (Dewan and Sibilia, 2023). Toxic leakages in the air, water, and soil extend beyond individuals and their families and produce epigenetic effects across generations (Guthman and Mansfield, 2013; Hoover, 2017; Murphy, 2013; Romero et al., 2017), or ‘toxic lineages of exposure’ formed through decades of industrial pollution (Lamoreaux, 2016: 207). Thus, ‘toxic flows’ draws attention to longer temporalities of structural violence since recent regulatory efforts to contain toxic flows may do little to address existing pollution in certain soils, airs, and waters that may already linger within the human and other-than-human bodies (Dewan and Sibilia, 2023) living at ‘the edges of exposure’ (See Tousignant, 2018).

This themed issue emerged from the panel, “Toxic flows: scales, spaces, and lived experiences of toxicity on bodies and the environment,” at the 2020 virtual conference “Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future”. Co-organized by the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Anthropological Institute, the conference focused on bringing the allied disciplines of geography and anthropology closer together. We combine spatial politics emphasizing socio-economic inequalities in toxic geographies with intimate anthropological ethnographic fieldwork on living with toxicity in chemo-social worlds. We argue that the concept of toxic flows helps to bridge the two disciplines while also pushing the boundaries of both theoretically, methodologically, and empirically: the everyday ethnographies in this volume trace political, socio-economic, and environmental stakes of toxic flows as a way to map wider political structures of inequality. Through concepts such as structural violence, slow bureaucracy, polluting temporalities, pathogenic proliferations, flowing toxics, ethnographic refusal and political resignation, the papers highlight people’s agentive capacities and the ambiguities arising from living with toxic exposure. By doing so they nuance ‘necropolitics’ (Mbembe, 2003) in chemical and toxic geographies (Davies, 2018; Pulido, 2016; Romero et al., 2017; Springer and Le Billon, 2016) to reframe debates about the political.

Furthermore, both geographers and anthropologists have thus far focused on chemicals - resulting in sub-fields such as ‘chemo-ethnographies’ (Jain, 2013; Kirksey, 2020; Shapiro, 2015; Shapiro and Kirksey, 2017) and chemical geographies (Balayannis, 2020; Romero et al., 2017). However, toxic matter is not limited to ‘industrial toxicants’, radioactivity or chemicals as Evans (2022) demonstrates with a virus emerging as a poisonous health-harming pathogen for salmon, the conjunctural outcome related to large-scale commercial aquaculture. This issue uses toxic flows to broaden the debate away from chemicals to include all substances that produce harm on living bodies, a timely intervention considering how zoonotic viruses like Sars-Cov-2 acts as a poison on organs and tissues. Thinking through the materiality of toxic flows further enables an analysis of materials becoming something else in their movement through space-time, producing new contexts as they become hazardous when broken or taken apart and flow through the atmosphere and waterscapes. The dust on leaves will never again be the solid material it came from, asbestos in the lungs will no longer be the fibers they once were. Through material and spatio-temporal attention to the everyday embodied experiences of toxicity and the indirect violence of larger-scaled global economic processes that produce and circulate toxic substances, this themed issue makes explicit a spatial politics of toxicity in late-stage capitalism.

An attention to the scaled materiality of toxic substances – from how they are bodily experienced to local, national, and global regulatory efforts to contain toxic seepages (Dewan and Sibilia, 2023; Evans, 2022; Ippolito, 2022; Perczel, 2023) reveal the unequal distribution and failures to contain toxic flows where some groups are more exposed to harmful effects than others. In an industrial Italian town, experiences of asbestos regulations in the past shape engagements with dioxins in the present, highlighting the temporalities of toxic matter as health effects are delayed over time (Ippolito, 2022). Even after decades of hazardous spills, asbestos and PCBs continue to find their way into shipbreaking sites in Bangladesh where the poorest workers are the most affected (Dewan and Sibilia, 2023). Burning Israeli e-waste in a Palestinian processing hub (Garb and Leblond, 2023) and ‘recycling’ western electronics in New Delhi’s peri-urban spaces (Perczel, 2023) both result in toxic fumes that flow through the air and lives of marginalized groups. In the Pacific Northwest, viral pathogens arising from industrial fish farms contaminate Indigenous territories (Evans, 2022). Building on anthropological work showing how toxic exposure is embedded within larger structures of settler-colonial and racial violence (Agard-Jones, 2013; Hoover, 2017; Liboiron, 2021; Murphy, 2013; Voyles, 2015), this themed issue highlights the necessity of a multi-scaled analysis to identify the linkages between local experiences of toxicity and global (and state) forces enabling structural violence.

Such a focus on the interconnections between pollution and violence is crucial, as scholarship on living in a ‘permanently polluted’ world may run the risk of overlooking the politics behind unequal toxic exposure and the more-than-economic dispossession it produces (Dewan, 2023). Chemo-ethnographies highlight the longstanding relationships and emergent social forms that arise from chemical exposures and dependencies, such as that of caring for loved ones with cancer (Shapiro and Kirksey, 2017). Similar research on medicinal treatments and drugs also highlights “shared pleasure, rather than shared suffering” where “ethnographers are living in chemo-social worlds, as both participants and observers'' (Shapiro and Kirksey, 2017: 483). The scaled ethnographies of toxic flows in this themed issue interrogate the extent to which people are equally exposed to chemo-social worlds. They build on toxic geographies to examine how power dynamics unevenly distribute toxic risk and harm across communities around the world. While much of toxic geographies have focused on pollution in North America, the collection of papers here range from polluted waters, or ‘anthroposeas’ (Anand, 2023), of Indigenous waters in Canada and coastal Bangladeshi commons to industrial sites of production in Italy, as well as e-waste hubs in Israeli-Palestinian border zones and in peri-urban New Delhi. Collectively they link the movement and material transformation of toxic flows to unequal exposure to health-harming matters arising from industrial capitalism.

To conclude, ethnographic attention to the spatial politics of toxic flows constitutes a critical intervention in geography and anthropology by underlining the inherent inequality of poisonous exposure that reduces life expectancy and devalues human (Dewan and Sibilia, 2023; Garb and Leblond, 2023; Ippolito, 2022) and other-than-human (Evans, 2022) life. Scaled ethnographies tracing toxic flows help us visualize spatial geographies of structural inequality and the ways in which toxicity reshapes sociopolitical life (Fisher et al., 2021). By doing so this themed issue seeks to offer a way to reimagine what non-toxic geographies might look like, or what might be termed as ‘toxic worldings’ (Chen, 2012; Nading, 2020; Prince and Geissler, 2020), that is to say a politics of creative social and ecological rearrangements to live in a world permeated by toxicity.

The articles

In “Pathogenic Proliferations: Salmon aquaculture, industrial viruses, and toxic geographies of settler-colonialism”, Darcey Evans (2022) investigates how ancestral waterways in what was once the largest salmon migration route in North America are increasingly seen as being poisoned by the virus, Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV). The article brings attention to viruses as toxicants and suggests that microbial pathogens are sometimes overlooked forms of toxic industrial waste. By tracing how PRV makes geographies of aquaculture, ecological encounters, and colonial entanglements visible within the bodies and blood cells of fish, Evans considers both how the toxic effects of industrializing waterscapes come to be embodied by fish in material ways, as well as how fish bodies, the waters they move throughout and the microbial worlds they carry with them become enfolded within the making of toxic geographies of settler-colonialism across multiple scales.

Raffaele Ippolito (2022) highlights environmental injustice within the EU, in the steel town of Taranto, Italy in “Toxicities that matter: Slow bureaucracy and polluting temporalities in a southern Italian City”. In Taranto, chemicals such as dioxins act as ‘shapeshifting pollutants’ with political properties that reframe toxicity through their continuous changes in the legal system. Toxicity here becomes detached from the lived experience of residents in contrast to the medically recognized and politically visible effects of the non-shapeshifting pollutant asbestos. Tracing toxic flows over time and space in Taranto shows that the toxicities that matter to environmental health do not necessarily coincide with those that shape the lived experience of residents. Rather, the political experience of shapeshifting pollutants in Taranto has been a terrain widely unregulated by weak institutions and slow bureaucracy.

In “Flowing toxics: E-waste field work in the Palestinian-Israeli space”, the authors Nelly Leblond and Yaakov Garb (2023) draw on long-term interdisciplinary fieldwork in a Palestinian-Israel border region to explore e-waste contamination. They adopt a ‘flowing toxics’ perspective, representing the multifaceted nature of toxics that crisscross through social, material, and biological spheres. This article highlights the deep entanglement of observation, coexistence with contaminants, and epistemological foundations in toxicology and how they are challenged by community-centered research methodologies. Through ethnographic vignettes of their geochemical and advocacy efforts in the politically divided landscapes of these settler-colonial borderlands, Garb and Leblond draw on multi-scaled analysis to show how their epistemologies and field practices (both human and scientific) have evolved to address the movement and changing forms of toxic matter across space and time.

Julia Perczel’s contribution, “E-waste is toxic, but for whom? The body politics of knowing toxic flows in Delhi” (2023), examines the body politics of toxic intimacy of processing e-waste in Kabadabad, India. The article draws attention to a key tension between the ethnographic refusal of e-waste workers that deny toxic harm from their work and middle-class, upper-caste outsiders (NGOs, corporations) that insist on its presence. Perczel asks whose bodily experience, and in what kind of representative forms, contributes towards documenting lived experience of a toxic place. In contrast to much environmental justice work on toxicity, she shows how the workers most likely harmed are not forthcoming with their own bodily accounts of slow violence. By re-examining the narratives of toxicity by NGOs and contrasting them with that of e-waste workers, this ethnography shows how environmental NGOs perpetuate a constructed sense of reality that is at odds with the lived experiences of working toxic e-waste flows.

Lastly, in “Global containments and local leakages: Structural violence and the toxic flows of shipbreaking”, Camelia Dewan and Elizabeth Sibilia (2023) conceptualize toxic flows as a method to trace the lived experiences of those who are exposed to industrial pollution from shipbreaking in coastal Chattogram, Bangladesh. They argue that shipbreaking with its local toxic leakages constitutes a form of “structural violence” where violence is built into the logic of accumulation strategies in the maritime economy and shows up as unequal power relations that produce the conditions for unequal life chances. Despite Bangladesh’s recent efforts towards ratifying the Hong Kong Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships, ethnographically tracing ‘toxic flows’ i.e., the movement of these toxic substances, allows their analysis to shift the scale and place of pollution and to make visible the different ways shipbreaking is perceived to negatively affect health and social reproduction beyond the boundary of shipbreaking yards.

In sum, these five papers represent a modest sample of the complex ways in which structural violence continues to produce and remake forms of ‘slow violence’ and how pollution can become visible, to ‘come into sight’. Visibility is a starting point from which to enact a politics of resistance.