Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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.

In this article, I ask how a virus associated with Atlantic salmon farms in British Columbia (BC) can reveal geographies of aquaculture, ecological encounters, and colonial entanglements within the bodies and blood cells of fish. Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV) travels through supply chains, ocean currents, and ecological interactions, and causes salmon to become at risk of ruptured blood cells and organ damage. This article proposes that PRV can be interpreted as a form of industrial waste that reinforces geographies of toxicity across multiple scales. I first situate the emergence of aquaculture in BC within colonial histories that continue to transform the coastal straits into contested sites of state-making. I then outline how multiple forms of life, ecological encounters, and unique hydrological conditions become entangled with industrial practices, giving rise to novel pathogenic proliferations. I end by describing how the appearance of yellow salmon hints at the potentially far-reaching presence of PRV, and I look to the bodies of salmon to consider how the expanding PRV footprint transforms regional ecologies and contributes to emergent toxic geographies of settler-colonialism. In forging connections between settler-colonialism, industrial landscape-making, and pathogenicity, I highlight how microbes can reflect and reinforce settler-colonial structures of dispossession. Moreover, in proposing that pathogens can be understood as components of industrial toxicity, I contribute to a reimagining of what industrial toxicants are and the forms they might take.

This paper deconstructs toxicity through a juxtaposition of a conventional epidemiological approach to pollutants and the lived experience of a highly polluted residential area next to the largest steel production plant in Europe. An ethnographic analysis of toxicity in Taranto illustrates the complexity of various temporal scales through which toxic chemicals contribute to new biological, political and moral balances. Attuning to the slow experiences of pollution is fundamental to shed light on the processes moulding aspirations to environmental justice within the community. In particular, law and bureaucracy imbue pollutants with experiential legitimacy, allowing them to be seen, contested and collectivized. I focus on the residents’ and workers’ dissonant experiences with the bureaucratic system to illustrate how their encounter with asbestos has profoundly shaped toxic exposure to less bureaucratically visible shapeshifting pollutants, thus contributing to a diffused sense of political resignation.

We draw on several emerging literatures on contamination and waste and our own fieldwork on e-waste contamination in a Palestinian-Israeli border space to describe a “flowing” approach to toxic phenomena. We use this term as a shorthand to underscore the particular complexities of the socio-material-biological node called “toxics,” and the corresponding epistemic, methodological, and moral demands of studying them. Some episodes from typical days of field work assessing the dispersal of heavy metals from sites of e-waste burning illustrate our claims. Even this attempt to use straightforward techniques to measure the presence of an object of apparent elemental materiality was continually permeated and unsettled by the inescapable flowiness of toxics. Their sources, generation processes and fates were mobile and multiscalar, remarkably patchy heterogeneous and contingent in ways that mattered. At issue was not (just) inadequate knowledge, but the inescapably relational biophysical and social nature of toxics; their entanglement not only with the technical means, processes and definitions that make them perceptible, but with the multiple and often disjunct social contexts that allow, inform, and motivate attention and access to toxics sites, and the production of knowledge from them.

Bodily knowledge and lived experience of toxic exposures in e-waste markets are central to policies and legal frameworks that are being rolled out globally enforcing the “polluter pays” principle. Yet, the sensory experience of toxicity is far from the straightforward, narratable knowledge, which it is often made out to be. This article builds on twelve months of research into the process of establishing formal e-waste recycling channels in New Delhi, India. Environmental practitioners and e-waste workers, each in a different relation to power and toxicity, presented contradictory understandings and challenged the continuity between sensing bodies posed by environmental advocacy narratives. Acknowledging the difficulty to pin down lived experience, I compare the certainty with which employees of a producer responsibility organisation present toxicity for the purpose of spreading awareness to the ambivalence with which informal e-waste recyclers relate to the toxicity in their own environment. The paper highlights the process of turning bodily experience into knowledge and proposes that knowing toxicity is the result of socially and economically inflected relations between bodies, chemicals, forms of knowledge, and the material dismantling process. Rather than accepting the immediacy of sensory experiences, or looking to find the authentic witness, I suggest a triangulation of bodies differently positioned in relation to the processes and places in question.

This article explores how ship recycling—an essential part of the shipping economy—results in breaking up toxic vessels that leak hazardous materials into coastal communities and wetlands ecologies of South Asia. Drawing on multi-scaled and multisited ethnographic fieldwork with shipbreaking workers and local fishing communities in Chattogram, Bangladesh as well as with shipbreaking yard owners, maritime consultants, and government officials, we conceptualize toxic flows as a method to trace the lived experiences of those who are exposed to industrial pollution from shipbreaking. First, we propose 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. Second, we discuss Bangladesh’s recent efforts towards ratifying the Hong Kong Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships and its potential to contain these toxic flows. Lastly, we explore how ethnographically tracing ‘toxic flows’ i.e., the movement of these toxic substances, allows us to shift scales of analysis and make visible the different ways shipbreaking is perceived to negatively affect health and social reproduction beyond the boundary of shipbreaking yards. We conclude that structural violence such as reduced life expectancies due to poisonous exposure risks becoming embedded in the logic of oceanic forms of accumulation without state regulatory enforcement and supervision.

Building on work in feminist geopolitics, we discuss how the governance of in/fertility affects the value assigned to different bodies and the question whose bodies and lives are considered as worthy of reproducing in Mexico. To reveal the geopolitical entanglements of past and present forms of reproductive governance, we investigate the transnational connections of Mexico’s fertility network with Spain and the United States of America. We juxtapose visual materials from political campaigns of the past with advertisements for present-day fertility clinics to trace the reproductive geopolitics of (post)colonialism that shape current developments, practices, and discourses in this transnational fertility network. Each pair of visuals exemplifies particular times and spaces of reproductive geopolitics. The paper reveals how the contemporary Mexican fertility market is shaped by transnational forms of reproductive governance. We employ visual juxtaposition to provoke readers to think about the entanglement of present-day fertility markets with past reproductive geopolitics.