Critical approaches are those that question premises, assumptions, and ways that things become normal or stable. 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 evidence have high stake ramifications. Contrary to popular adage, the meanings and methods of toxicity weren’t decided by Paracelsus in the moment he declared, “the danger is in the dose.” Rather,as a description of chemical harm, toxicity is constantly being upset, resettled, and contested. These texts offer critical insights into these processes.

·       Aftalion, F. (2001). A history of the international chemical industry. Chemical Heritage Foundation.

·       Ah-King, M., & Hayward, E. (2013). Toxic sexes—Perverting pollution and queering hormone disruption. O-Zone: A Journal of Object Oriented Studies, 1.

·       Allen, B. L. (2003). Uneasy alchemy: citizens and experts in Louisiana’s chemical corridor disputes. MIT Press.

·       Arnold, D. (2016). Toxic histories: Poison and pollution in modern India. Cambridge University Press.

·       Auyero, J. and Swistun, D. (2008). “The Social Production of Toxic Uncertainty.” American Sociological Review, 73(3): 357–379. 118

·       Bagelman, J., & Wiebe, S. M. (2017). Intimacies of global toxins: Exposure & resistance in ‘Chemical Valley’. Political Geography, 60, 76-85.

·       Barnett, J. T. (2015). Toxic portraits: Resisting multiple invisibilities in the environmental justice movement. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 101(2), 405-425.

·       Bohme, S. R. (2014). Toxic injustice: a transnational history of exposure and struggle. Univ of California Press.

·       Bonds, E. (2016). Legitimating the environmental injustices of war: toxic exposures and media silence in Iraq and Afghanistan. Environmental Politics, 25(3), 395-413.

·       Boudia, S., & Jas, N. (Eds.). (2014). Powerless science?: Science and politics in a toxic world (Vol. 2). Berghahn Books.

·       Brewer, P. R., & Ley, B. L. (2011). Multiple exposures: Scientific controversy, the media, and public responses to Bisphenol A. Science Communication, 33(1), 76-97.

·       Brickman, R., Jasanoff, S., & Ilgen, T. (1985). Controlling chemicals: The politics of regulation in Europe and the United States (p. 276). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

·       Brown, K. L. (2013). Plutopia: Nuclear families, atomic cities, and the great Soviet and American plutonium disasters. Oxford University Press, USA.

·       Brown, P. (1992). Popular epidemiology and toxic waste contamination: lay and professional ways of knowing. Journal of health and social behavior, 267-281.

·       Brown, Phil. 2007. Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement. Columbia University Press.

·       Brulle, Robert, and David Pellow. 2006. “Environmental Justice: Human Health and Environmental Inequalities.” Annual Review of Public Health 27 (1): 103–24.

·       Buell, Lawrence. 1998. “Toxic Discourse.” Critical Inquiry 24 (3): 639–65.

·       Burney, I. A. (1999). A poisoning of no substance: the trials of Medico-Legal Proof in Mid-Victorian England. The Journal of British Studies, 38(01), 59-92.

·       Bullard, Robert D., and Beverly Hendrix Wright. 1986. “The Politics of Pollution: Implications for the Black Community.” Phylon (1960-) 47 (1): 71–78.

·       Carson, Rachel. 2002. Silent Spring. Anniversary edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

·       Charvolin, F., Frioux, S., Kamoun, L., Mélard, F. and Roussel, I. (2015) Un air familier ? Sociohistoire des pollutions atmosphériques. Paris: Presses des Mines.

·       Checker, M. (2005). Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town. New York: New York University Press.

·       Checker, M. 2007. “‘But I Know It’s True’: Environmental Risk Assessment, Justice, and Anthropology.” Human Organization 66 (2): 112–24.

·      Chen, M. Y. (2012) Animacies. Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

·       Colborn, T., D. Dumanoski, et al. (1996). Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival?: A Scientific Detective Story. New York, Dutton.

·       Commission for Racial Justice United Church of Christ. 1987. “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites.” Public Data Access, Inc.

·       Cordner, A. (2016). Toxic Safety: Flame Retardants, Chemical Controversies, and Environmental Health. Columbia University Press.

·       Cram, S. (2011). Escaping S-102: Waste, Illness, and the Politics of Not Knowing. International Journal of Science in Society, 2(1).

·       Cram, S. (2015). Becoming Jane: The making and unmaking of Hanford’s nuclear body. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33(5), 796-812.

·       Cram, S. (2016). Living in Dose: Nuclear Work and the Politics of Permissible Exposure. Public Culture, 28(3 80), 519-539.

·       Cray, C. (2000). Pandora’s poison: Chlorine, health, and a new environmental strategy. Public Health Reports, 115(4), 378.

·       Davis, Devra. 2003. When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales Of Environmental Deception And The Battle Against Pollution. Basic Books.

·       Davis, F. R. (2014). Banned: a history of pesticides and the science of toxicology. Yale University Press.

·       Di Chiro, Giovanna. 2003. “Beyond Ecoliberal ‘Common Futures’: Environmental Justice, Toxic Touring, and a Transcommunal Politics of Place.” In Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference, 204–32. Donald S. Moore, Anand Pandian, Jake Kosek, Eds. Duke University Press Books.

·       Dietrich, A.S. (2013). The Drug Company Next Door: Pollution, Jobs, and Community Health in Puerto Rico. New York: New York University Press.

·       Dillon, L. (2014). Race, waste, and space: Brownfield redevelopment and environmental justice at the Hunters Point Shipyard. Antipode, 46(5), 1205-1221.

·       Dillon, L., & Sze, J. (2016). Police Powers and Particulate Matters: Environmental Justice and the Spacialities of In/securities in US Cities. English Language Notes.

·       Dunlap, T. R. (1978). Science as a guide in regulating technology: The case of DDT in the United States. Social Studies of Science, 8(3), 265-285.

·       DuPuis, E. M. (2000). Not in my body: BGH and the rise of organic milk. Agriculture and human values, 17(3), 285-295.

·       Edelstein, Michael. 2003. Contaminated Communities: Coping With Residential Toxic Exposure. Second Edition edition. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

·       Egan, M. (2008). Toxic knowledge: a mercurial fugue in three parts. Environmental History, 13(4), 636-642.

·       Egan, M. (2010). Mercury’s Web Some Reflections on Following Nature across Time and Place. Radical History Review, 2010(107), 111-126.

·       Erikson, K. (1995). A new species of trouble: The human experience of modern disasters. WW Norton & Company.

·       Fennell, C.. (2016) “Are We All Flint?,” Limn 7.

·       Fennell, C. (2016). The Family Toxic: Triaging Obligation in Post-Welfare Chicago. South Atlantic Quarterly, 115(1), 9-32.

·       Fortun, K. (2009). Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, disaster, new global orders. University of Chicago Press.

·       Fortun, K. and M. Fortun (2005). “Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology.” American Anthropologist 107(1): 43-54.

·       Fortun, Kim. 2012. “Ethnography in Late Industrialism.” Cultural Anthropology 27 (3): 446–64.

·       Frickel, S. (2004). Chemical consequences: Environmental mutagens, scientist activism, and the rise of genetic toxicology. Rutgers University Press.

·       Gagnon, V. S. (2016). Ojibwe Gichigami (“Ojibwa’s Great Sea”): an intersecting history of treaty rights, tribal fish harvesting, and toxic risk in Keweenaw Bay, United States. Water History, 4(8), 365-384.

·       Gallo, M. A. (2008). History and Scope of Toxicology. Casarett and Doull’s toxicology: the basic science of poisons. L. J. Casarett, J. Doull and C. D. Klaassen. New York, McGraw-Hill: 1-4.

·       Gatlin, J. (2015). Toxic Sublimity and the Crisis of Human Perception: Rethinking Aesthetic, Documentary, and Political Appeals in Contemporary Wasteland Photography. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 22(4), 717-741.

·       Graeter, Stefanie. (2017). “To Revive an Abundant Life: Catholic Science and Neoextractivist Politics in Peru’s Mantaro Valley.” Cultural Anthropology 32(1): 117–148.

·       Gray-Cosgrove, C., Liboiron, M., & Lepawsky, J. (2015). The Challenges of Temporality to Depollution & Remediation. SAPI ENS. Surveys and Perspectives Integrating Environment and Society, (8.1).

·       Grossman, E. (2009). Chasing Molecules: Poisonous products, human health, and the promise of green chemistry. Washington, DC, Island Press/Shearwater Books.

·       Harrison, Jill Lindsey. 2011. Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

·       Hecht, G. (2012). Being nuclear: Africans and the global uranium trade. MIT Press.

·       Hernández-Martín, G., & Martínez-Pérez, J. (2012). The toxic oil syndrome as a catalyst to psychiatric reform in Spain (1981–85). History of Psychiatry, 23(4), 469–482.

·       Higgins, Robert R. 1994. “Race, Pollution, and the Mastery of Nature:” Edited by Eugene C. Hargrove. Environmental Ethics, Center for Environmental Philosophy, The University of North Texas, 16 (3): 251–64.

·       Hoover, Elizabeth. (2017). The River is In Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community. University of Minnesota Press.

·       Hoover, E., Cook, K., Plain, R., Sanchez, K., Waghiyi, V., Miller, P., … & Carpenter, D. O. (2012). Indigenous peoples of North America: environmental exposures and reproductive justice. Environmental Health Perspectives, 120(12), 1645.

·       Hurtig, Anna Karin, and Miguel San Sebastián. 2005. “Epidemiology vs Epidemiology: The Case of Oil Exploitation in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador.” International Journal of Epidemiology 34 (5): 1170–72.

·       Jas, N., & Boudia, S. (Eds.). (2015). Toxicants, health and regulation since 1945. Routledge.

·       Kallet, A., & Schlink, F. J. (1933). 100,000,000 guinea pigs: Dangers in everyday foods, drugs, and cosmetics. Vanguard Press.

·       Kysar, D. A. (2010). Regulating from nowhere: Environmental law and the search for objectivity. Yale University Press.

·       Lamoreaux, Janelle. 2016. “What If the Environment Is a Person? Lineages of Epigenetic Science in a Toxic China.” Cultural Anthropology 31 (2): 188–214.

·       Landa, M. S. (2016). Crude residues: The workings of failing oil infrastructure in Poza Rica, Veracruz, Mexico. Environment and Planning A, 48(4), 718-735.

·       Landecker, H. (2011). Food as exposure: Nutritional epigenetics and the new metabolism. BioSocieties, 6(2), 167.

·       Langston, N. (2010). Toxic bodies: Hormone disruptors and the legacy of DES. Yale University Press.

·       Leifsen, E. (2017). Wasteland by design: Dispossession by contamination and the struggle for water justice in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The Extractive Industries and Society, 4(2), 344-351.

·       Lerner, Steve. 2010. Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States. The MIT Press.

·       Liboiron, M. (2013). Plasticizers: a twenty-first-century miasma. Accumulation: the material politics of plastic, 134-49.

·       Liboiron, M. (2016). Redefining pollution and action: The matter of plastics. Journal of Material Culture, 21(1), 87-110.

·       Little, P. (2014). Toxic Town: IBM, Pollution and Industrial Risks. New York: New York University Press.

·       Lora-Wainwright, A. (2013). Fighting for Breath: Living Morally and Dying of Cancer in a Chinese Village. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

·       Lyons, Kristina. 2016. “Decomposition as Life Politics: Soils, Selva, and Small Farmers under the Gun of the U.S.-Colombian War on Drugs.” Cultural Anthropology 31 (1): 56–81.

·       MacKendrick, N. A. (2010). Media framing of body burdens: precautionary consumption and the individualization of risk. Sociological Inquiry, 80(1), 126-149.

·       Mackendrick, N. (2014). More Work for Mother: Chemical Body Burdens as a Maternal Responsibility 1. Gender & Society, 28(5), 705-728.

·       Malin, S. A. (2015). The price of nuclear power: uranium communities and environmental justice. Rutgers University Press.

·       Mansfield, B. (2012). Environmental health as biosecurity:“Seafood choices,” risk, and the pregnant woman as threshold. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(5), 969-976.

·       Markowitz, G., & Rosner, D. (2013). Deceit and denial: The deadly politics of industrial pollution. Univ of California Press.

·       Markowitz, G., & Rosner, D. (2013). Lead Wars: The politics of science and the fate of America’s children (Vol. 24). Univ of California Press.

·       Masco, J. (2004). Mutant ecologies: radioactive life in post–cold war New Mexico. Cultural Anthropology, 19(4), 517-550.

·       Masco, J. (2015). The age of fallout. History of the Present, 5(2), 137-168.

·       Mitman, G., Murphy, M., & Sellers, C. (Eds.). (2004). Landscapes of exposure: knowledge and illness in modern environments (Vol. 19). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

·       Murphy, M. (2006). Sick building syndrome and the problem of uncertainty: Environmental politics, technoscience, and women workers. Duke University Press.

·       Murphy, M. (2008). Chemical regimes of living. Environmental History, 13(4), 695-703.

·       Murphy, M. (2013). Distributed reproduction, chemical violence, and latency. Scholar and Feminist Online, 11, 3.

·       Nading, A. (2016). Local biologies, leaky things, and the chemical infrastructure of global health. Medical Anthropology, 1–16.

·       Nash, L. (2017). From Safety to Risk: The Cold War Contexts of American Environmental Policy. Journal of Policy History, 29(1), 1-33.

·       Nash, L. L. (2006). Inescapable ecologies: A history of environment, disease, and knowledge. Univ of California Press.

·       Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press.

·       Oreskes, N. and E. M. Conway (2010). Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York, Bloomsbury Press.

·       Ottinger, G. (2010). Buckets of resistance: Standards and the effectiveness of citizen science. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 35(2), 244-270.

·       Ottinger, G. (2013). Refining expertise: How responsible engineers subvert environmental justice challenges. NYU Press.

·       Peeples, J. (2011). Toxic sublime: Imaging contaminated landscapes. Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 5(4), 373-392.

·       Pellow, David. 2007. Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice. 1st ed. The MIT Press.

·       Petryna, A. (2003). Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

·       Pezzullo, Phaedra Carmen. 2009. Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice. 1st ed. University Alabama Press.

·       Pulido, Laura. 2000. “Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 (1): 12–40.

·       Reed, T. V. (2009). Toxic colonialism, environmental justice, and Native resistance in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the US, 34(2), 25-42.

·       Roberts, Dorothy. 2012. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century. New York; London: The New Press.

·       Roberts, J. A. (2010). Reflections of an unrepentant plastiphobe: Plasticity and the STS life. Science as Culture, 19(1), 101-120.

·       Roberts, J. A., & Langston, N. (2008). Toxic Bodies/Toxic environments: An interdisciplinary forum [introduction]. Environmental History, 629-635.

·       Roberts, L. (2015). Bio-ethnography: a collaborative, methodological experiment in Mexico City. Somatosphere, October, available at: http://somatosphere. net/2015/02/bio‐ethnography. html.

·       Rodríguez-Giralt, I. (2015) Birds as lines: The production of alternative regimes of environmental management in the aftermath of a toxic disaster, Geoforum, 66: 156–166.

·       Romero, A. M. (2016). “From oil well to farm”: Industrial waste, Shell Oil, and the petrochemical turn (1927–1947).” Agricultural History, 90(1), 70-93.

·       San Sebastián, Miguel, and Juan Antonio Córdoba. 1999. Yana Curi: The Impact of Oil Development on the Health of the People of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Departamento de Pastoral Social Del Vicariato de Aguarico, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Medicus Mundi. Coca, Ecuador: CICAME.

·       Scott, D. N. (2012). Pollution and the body boundary: exploring scale, gender and remedy. Feminist perspectives on tort law, 55-79.

·       Sellers, C. (1994). Factory as Environment: Industrial Hygiene, Professional Collaboration and the Modern Sciences of Pollution. Environmental History Review, 18(1), 55-83.

·       Sellers, C. (1997). Discovering environmental cancer: Wilhelm Hueper, post-World War II epidemiology, and the vanishing clinician’s eye. American journal of public health, 87(11), 1824-1835.

·       Sellers, C. (2014). From poison to carcinogen: towards a global history of concerns about benzene. Global Environment, 7(1), 38-71.

·       Sellers, C. C. (1997). Hazards of the job: from industrial disease to environmental health science. Univ of North Carolina Press.

·       Sellers, C., & Melling, J. (Eds.). (2011). Dangerous trade: histories of industrial hazard across a globalizing world. Temple University Press.

·       Schrader, A. (2010) Responding to Pfiesteria Piscicida (the fish killer): Phantomatic Ontologies, Indeterminacy, and Responsibility in Toxic Microbiology, Social Studies of Science, 40 (2), pp. 275–306.

·       Shamasunder, B. (2011). Body Burden Politics: How Biomonitoring Data is Influencing Chemicals Governance in the US. University of California, Berkeley.

·       Shapiro, N. (2015). Attuning to the chemosphere: Domestic formaldehyde, bodily reasoning, and the chemical sublime. Cultural Anthropology, 30, 368–393.


·       Shostak, S. (2013). Exposed science: genes, the environment, and the politics of population health. University of California Press.

·       Singer, M. (2011). “Down Cancer Alley: The Lived Experience of Health and Environmental Suffering in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor.” Medical Anthropological Quarterly, 25(2): 141–163.

·       Suryanarayanan, S., & Kleinman, D. L. (2016). Vanishing Bees: Science, Politics, and Honeybee Health. Rutgers University Press.

·       Sze, Julie. 2006. Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

·       Taylor, D. (2014). Toxic communities: Environmental racism, industrial pollution, and residential mobility. NYU Press.

·       Thornton, J. (2000). Pandora’s Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

·       Tilt, B. (2013). “Industrial Pollution and Environmental Health in Rural China: Risk, Uncertainty, and Individualization.” The China Quarterly, 214, pp 283­-301.

·       Ureta, S. (2016). Caring for waste: Handling tailings in a Chilean copper mine. Environment and Planning A, 0308518X16645103.

·       Van Horssen, J. (2016). A Town Called Asbestos: Environmental Contamination, Health, and Resilience in a Resource Community. UBC Press.

·       Vogel, D. (2012). The politics of precaution: regulating health, safety, and environmental risks in Europe and the United States. Princeton University Press.

·       Vogel, S. A. (2012). Is it Safe?: BPA and the Struggle to Define the Safety of Chemicals. Univ of California Press.

·       Vogel, S. A., & Roberts, J. A. (2011). Why the toxic substances control act needs an overhaul, and how to strengthen oversight of chemicals in the interim. Health affairs, 30(5), 898-905.

·       Voyles, T. B. (2015). Wastelanding: Legacies of uranium mining in Navajo country. University of Minnesota Press.

·       Walker, B. L. (2011). Toxic archipelago: a history of industrial disease in Japan. University of Washington Press.

·       Walker, J. S. (2000). Permissible dose: a history of radiation protection in the twentieth century. Univ of California Press.

·       Widger, T. (2015). Suicide and the ‘Poison Complex’: Toxic Relationalities, Child Development, and the Sri Lankan Self-Harm Epidemic. Medical anthropology, 34(6), 501-516.

·       Wynne, B. (1987). Risk management and hazardous waste: Implementation and the dialectics of credibility. Springer-Verlag.