Ethnographic refusal is a practice by which researchers and research participants together decide not to make particular information available for use within the academy. Its purpose is not to bury information, but to ensure that communities are able to respond to issues on their own terms.
Toxics: A Symposium on Exposure, Entanglement, and Endurance was heralded as “the most important conversation on body burdens yet.” See the Twitter version of that conversation here.
Over the past few decades, we have met with much success in curbing some of Americans’ exposure to lead. Yet they have struggled to contain this continuing danger precisely because it is literally built into our water systems.
A pair of new publications focus on the “chicken or egg” question in environmental justice: Are present-day disparities around hazardous sites the result of a pattern of placing hazardous waste sites, polluting industrial facilities, and other locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) disproportionately where poor people and people of color live? Or are they the result of demographic changes that occur after the facilities have been sited?
Originally posted on speculative fish-ctions (Dr. Zoe Todd):
by Zoe Todd, PhD Candidate, Social Anthropology, University of Aberdeen Personal paradigm shifts have a way of sneaking up on you. It started, innocently enough, with a trip to Edinburgh to see the great Latour discuss his latest work in February 2013. I was giddy with excitement:…
Rob Nixon’s book shows how the invisible, destructive impacts of neoliberalism stretch across vast spatial and temporal scales. Within this history, profits are internalized and risks exacerbated as they are offloaded on poor communities.
Like queer theory, discard studies is interested in uneven remainders, things that don’t fit neatly into categories. Both concern themselves with the strange and imperfect construction of divisions that do violence to humans, cultures, and environments, while still attending to the fact that these divisions have meaning for people, that they are strategic, and that they structure our thought in ways that are almost impossible to escape.
The 40 most influential environmental justice conflicts in recent American history are now included in a Global Atlas of Environmental Justice. In the United States, decades of research have documented a strong correlation between the location of environmental burdens and the racial/ethnic background of the most impacted residents.
This paper examines the politics of open defecation by focusing on everyday intersections of the body and infrastructure in the metabolic city, which produces profoundly unequal opportunities for fulfilling bodily needs. Specifically, it examines how open defecation emerges in Mumbai’s informal settlements through everyday embodied experiences, practices and perceptions forged in relation to the materialities of informality and infrastructure.
The report, called “Who’s in Danger? Race, Poverty, and Chemical Disasters,” sought to examine who lives in “fenceline” neighborhoods adjacent to large chemical plants. The report said those residents were more likely to be black or Latino and have lower home values, incomes and education levels than average Americans.
Discard Studies 