Nuclear State, Nuclear Waste
Nuclear State, Nuclear Waste: Emily Simmonds on Canada as a nuclear nation & ongoing colonialism through uranium mining.
Tag: toxicity
Processing Settler Toxicities: Part II
This second instalment of a 2+ part post is adapted from a presentation at the 2018 Cultures of Energy Symposium at Rice University. Many thanks to everyone who…
Processing Settler Toxicities: Part I
This 2+ part post is adapted from a presentation at the 2018 Cultures of Energy Symposium at Rice University. Many thanks to everyone who responded to my call…
Commentary: Toxic Bodies, Part II
By Kristina Lyons, University of California, Santa Cruz § The president of the communal action committee whom I call Doña Marta ushered me to a more secluded corner behind…
Contamination of the Social Fabric: Sápara Leaders’ Resistance to Oil Companies in the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Narrow Vision of Environmental Impact Studies
By Lindsay Ofrias, Princeton University § In the shadow of the world’s worst case of oil contamination, the Sápara, a small group of indigenous people, are desperately protecting their…
Weeds, Herbicides, and Bodies: Emerging Entanglements in Toxic Agricultural Landscapes
By Tony VanWinkle, Sterling College § Dedicated to the memory of Jackie Dill. Pigweed. Photo by author. Shortly after the unexpected death of friend and mentor Jackie Dill, I…
Commentary: Toxic Bodies, Part I
By Mónica Salas Landa, Lafayette College § Oil infrastructure, Poza Rica, Veracruz, Mexico. Image by author. ‘‘How do you feel living right across from the oil and gas complex?’’ I…
On Contamination: Conservation Science in Devilish Landscapes
By Meredith Root-Bernstein, Institut National de Recherche Agronomique, Grignon, France § When you first see the gold mine in Alhué you are impressed by how massive the cascade of…
Chemical Showers: How Daily Routines Structure Our Exposures to Toxicants
By Rachael Wakefield-Rann, University of Technology Sydney § Source: http://cdn.mamamia.com.au/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/04144722/supermarket-skin-care-buys1.png The choreography of daily life dic…
These chemicals are bad for babies and whales: Why haven’t they been banned in Canada?
Canadian regulators are all over the map with respect to flame retardants. On PBDEs, Canada infamously refused to take meaningful regulatory action. The government found most PBDEs to…
Tracing Chemical Intimacies
By Sophia Jaworski (University of Toronto) A middle-aged woman in the Greater Toronto Area wears a charcoal mask in her bedroom to prevent asthma spurred by breathing in…
Spirit, Monster, Table and Tongue
By Caroline Merrifield (Yale) My friend Zhang is one of the head chefs at the fine-dining farm-to-table restaurant in Hangzhou, China, where I did most of my dissertation…
Benzene, PCBs, and industrial chemistry: A narrative bibliography
How the Benzene Tree Polluted the World in The Atlantic by Rebecca Altman, is a narrative exploration of the rise of organic chemistry, and the industrialization of the branch of chemistry…
Review of Richard S. Newman’s “Love Canal: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present”
Newman’s activists press for environmental change imbedded with critiques of capitalism and industrialization, racial injustice, and its global implications. This view distorts the complexity of histo…
Toxins or Toxicants? Why the difference matters
When we accidentally call toxicants “toxins,” we are also accidentally naturalizing industrially-produced chemicals and their politics.
Pollution is Colonialism
Colonialism in Canada is an ongoing structure whereby settler society and government assert sovereignty over lands already occupied by Indigenous peoples.
Cleaning up toxic sites shouldn’t clear out the neighbors
Notions of “sustainability” and “urban greening” ought to include values of justice and equity. Otherwise, important projects like the Blue Greenway will build sustainable waterfronts for the urban…
Call for Posts: Toxic Bodies
“A pigeon trap”. By Provincial Archives of Alberta. (No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44059615) Epigenetics, developmental biology, and feminist science and…
Bibliography on critical approaches to toxics and toxicity
Toxicity, toxins, and toxicants are areas of critical concern because controversies over what they mean, how they act, how they come into being and where, and what counts as…
Community Responses to Toxic Hazards: A Reading List
A reading list of the David and Goliath story of communities versus industries, governments, and polluting infrastructures.
Call for participation: Enacting Environmental Data Justice
Held on Tuesday, August 29, this event will explore possibilities for data justice through a framework of environmental justice.
CFP: Theorizing Harm
Whether focused on toxicity, disease, disaster, violence, or malfunction, STS scholars have long studied harm. Given the great diversity of approaches and cases, this panel seeks to take…
Take a deep breath – here’s what 2016 revealed about the deadly dangers of air pollution
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has confirmed that 92% of the world’s urban population now live in cities where the air is toxic.
Are We All Flint? by Catherine Fennell
[This article originally appeared in Limn, Issue No. 7, “Public Infrastructures / Infrastructural Publics”.] For the past several decades, Flint, Michigan, has staggered under waves of de…