Category: Conference Review

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Sensing Cumulative Toxicities

In our everyday lives we encounter and are exposed to a dizzying array of chemicals – through the air we breathe, water we drink, food we eat, products we buy, work we do, and environments we move through. A recent review of the scientific literature estimates that the accelerating mass-production of chemicals has led to the accumulation of 350,000 “novel entities” (human-made chemicals that did not previously exist) in the environment.[1] They suggest this exceeds the “planetary boundary” for chemical pollution, meaning it is and will continue to disrupt the operation of ecological systems and have major impacts on human health.

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Conference Review

Confronting Legacies of Toxic Goodness: Speculative Reflections from the 4S 2021 Annual Meeting

Renewable energies, green/blue/bio-economies, waste management systems, as well as sustainable agriculture and aquaculture hold within them the possibility of working towards a “Greater Good”, however, “goodness” is frequently built on toxic colonial and capitalist processes that are rendered invisible through sustainability discourse. How can good practices, relationships, and things be cultivated in an environment where toxicants, toxic politics, and toxic relationalities are constantly reproduced? How do toxic production systems—based on extractivism, colonialism, and plantation capitalism—foment new forms of sustainability that cannot be excised from these deadly foundations?

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Conference Review

Seeing with Water: Reflections from the InterAsia Water(s) Graduate Conference at Yale University

Rains, rivers, tides, wells—waters, in their multifarious forms, have long shaped social worlds in and across Asia, as indeed in other parts of the globe. As the recent scholarship on its privatization, commodification, and trade, reminds us, water is a vital resource for human life. But it also exceeds such functions. Water mediates, reveals, nurtures, and obstructs social processes, as a site of mobility and immobility, cultural relationships and meanings, as well as political contestation and negotiations.

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