Hello geographers,
Please see details below for the third annual ‘Toxic Expertise’ Workshop at the University of Warwick (May 15-16th 2018):
(In)visibility and Pollution: Making ‘Sense’ of Toxic Hazards and Environmental Justice
Creating and disseminating knowledge of toxic pollution is a key challenge for academics,
activists, and local communities alike. Not all toxins are detectable through human sensory
perceptions; and our bodies do not always react to toxins immediately. The long-term health
impacts of accumulated contamination are severe, but the elusive nature of toxic pollution
makes appropriate actions difficult if not impossible.
Since toxic landscapes are replete with deferred harms, secreted hazards, and invisible
layers of ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2011), making toxic pollution known is a contested social and
political process (Hecht 2012, Walker 2012). Informal knowledge is regularly overlooked
while expensive scientific expertise is often required to ‘translate’ toxicity into legible and/or
legal forms. But even when contaminated communities can ‘sense’ or ‘measure’ the pollution
surrounding them, converting that knowledge into political action is not a straightforward
process.
In a world full of contested toxic hazards, how pollution is made visible - or rendered
unknowable - is of critical concern for the social sciences. Using visibility as a starting point
to explore our sensorial engagements with toxic times and spaces, this workshop will
showcase papers from a range of disciplines that tackle the challenge of making ‘sense’ of
toxic pollution and environmental injustice through qualitative and quantitative approaches,
including participatory methods, storytelling, affect, spatial data analysis, and ethnographic
research, among many others. We invite theory-driven and empirically rich papers from a
broad range of disciplines that explore how toxicity can be sensed, embodied, and made
visible. Possible topics and themes include but are not limited to:
What methods and approaches can we use to make the unseen world of toxic
pollution visible?
What other senses, beyond the visual, are important in narrating and making sense
of toxicity?
Can ‘citizen science’ provide new ways of understanding toxic hazards?
How do local communities ‘sense’ and make sense of pollution?
What role does visualising and sensing pollution play in the success and failure of
environmental justice campaigns?
How can quantitative analyses be used in telling stories of pollution without
oversimplifying or overgeneralizing?
What are the politics that surround sensing pollution; in what ways do powerful actors
make toxicity (in)visible?
The two-day event (May 15-16th) is the third annual interdisciplinary Toxic Expertise workshop at the
University of Warwick, funded by the European Research Council (ERC). The Toxic
Expertise project, led by Dr Alice Mah, is the first in-depth sociological exploration of the
global petrochemical industry in relation to corporate social responsibility and environmental
justice.
Accommodation will be paid for, and there is limited financial support for travel.
Please send your paper abstracts of 250 words and a short bio-blurb by Monday
26th February, 2018 to the following address: [log in to unmask]
Accepted delegates will asked to submit working papers (2000-3000 words) two weeks
before the workshop (Tuesday 1st May, 2018). These will be shared with all delegates before
the workshop for discussion. We also hope these can be used towards a future published
output.
Many thanks,
Thom
Dr Thom Davies
Research Fellow
Department of Sociology
University of Warwick
twitter: @ThomDavies
email: [log in to unmask]
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