Introduction to special issue: “Scaled ethnographies of toxic flows”

Abstract

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.