Particulate Matters: Air Pollution and the Political Ecology of a Boundary Object

Abstract

Air pollution now affects 92 percent of the global population and is responsible for one out of nine deaths, nearly two thirds of which occur in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific. Emerging work on the political ecology of air pollution examines how its noxious effects are unevenly distributed across social categories such as race and class. Geographers know much less about the social mechanisms through which air pollution and its risks and mitigation efforts are calculated, however. Situated within northern Thailand’s haze crisis and its broader agrarian transitions, we employ ethnographic and geospatial methods to theorize air pollution as a boundary object. Throughout the region, uncertainty over the causes and constitution of air pollution and its flexible interpretation have driven the development of civil society sensor networks and the adoption of portable Air Quality Index monitors and hot spot locating apps. These increasingly widespread technologies not only democratize data but also play a growing role in shifting environmental narratives of seasonal air pollution. By homing in on the boundary work of air pollution, however, we argue that although new, more widely accessible modes of knowledge production can seemingly reduce uncertainty and shift environmental policy, they can also obscure the long-standing political-economic inequalities on which environmental problems are based. This article advances current debates at the nexus of political ecology and science and technology by demonstrating how particulate matter matters differently within and between social groups and the role of sociality in environmental change and the production of political space.