Contaminated Children: Debating the Banality, Precarity, and Futurity of Chemical Safety

Pezzullo,

doi:10.5250/resilience.1.2.004

Cited by 13 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Seasoned international development scholars skeptical of claims to "participatory" processes may recognize here a type of Fergusonian "anti-politics" machine (Ferguson 1994). Like androcentric Western experimental science based on (White) adult males (Pezzullo 2014), citizen science disproportionately attracts middle-class, White male participants (West et al 2016). It can also perpetuate a pattern noted by anthropologists of one-way directionality "where information fl ows from scientists to passive recipients" rather than examining how "science is embedded in power relations and subjective interests" (Checker 2007: 116).…”

Section: Citizen Science Into Canary Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

Canary Science in the Mineshaft of the Anthropocene

Grandia

2021

Environment and Society

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Alongside the melting of glaciers, human bodies warn of another petrochemically driven planetary crisis. Much as climate science ignored the early warning observations of Indigenous peoples, the medical establishment has oft en dismissed the canaries struggling to survive in the mineshaft of modernity. In an aleatory Anthropocene, we know not for whom the toxicity will toll. While case studies of environmental justice remain essential, the privileged must also be jolted into understanding their own ontological precariousness (i.e., vulnerability) from toxicants pervasive in everyday life. Moving beyond “citizen science” with inspiration from feminist ethics of care and relational Indigenous epistemologies, I make a case for the extrasensory value of “canary science.” If managerial “risk” was the keyword of the profiteering twentieth century, a sense of shared vulnerability in the coronavirus era could help usher in the transitions needed for survival in this polluted world.

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Section: Citizen Science Into Canary Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

Canary Science in the Mineshaft of the Anthropocene

Grandia

2021

Environment and Society

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“…To reframe neoliberalism as scene rather than conclusion is not to deny its impact on lived experiences. Our current moment is characterized by an increase in the centrality of the market, a decrease in government intervention, and an emphasis on consumer choice, each of which impacts our relationships to health: patients are reframed as consumers, health is represented as a commodity, and health services are increasingly privatized and individualized (see, Jette et al, 2016;Petersen and Lupton, 1996;Rose, 2007).…”

Section: Beyond Neoliberalizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lochlann Jain (2013) builds on Edelman: “The Child gains his potency in his abstract permanence and winsome innocence, in his asexuality, in his disconnection from the market and his prepolitical sensibility” (p. 64). Similarly, Phaedra Pezzullo (2014) argues that children, represented by a collective sense of permeability, vulnerability, and banality, are a crucial site to understand concepts of futurity (p. 17). For all three theorists, and for ParticipACTION and Fitbit, the representational power of the Child invites us to imagine a better future and urges us to act in the present to secure such a future.…”

Section: Pieties Of Optimizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The piety of optimization: The rhetoric of health awareness in ParticipACTION and Fitbit

Gaudet

2021

Health (London)

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This article uses the tools of rhetorical study to investigate how health awareness, as both a concept and a set of beliefs that reinforce ideals of health, permeates everyday life and affects ways of being. I explore how health awareness is communicated through both public health and commercial marketing campaigns, and argue that as the sources of information change, so too do the ideas of health that we are asked to be aware of. Through an analysis of the websites of ParticipACTION, a publicly funded health and fitness campaign, and Fitbit, a corporation that produces wearable technologies, I show that these organizations provide their audiences with instructions for self-conduct in the pursuit of health through the piety that time is a resource to be managed. Through this piety, ParticipACTION and Fitbit’s websites each reify an altar of health where health is represented as a socially and physically fitter (optimized) self, always just out of reach and attainable in the future. I conclude with a call for critical descriptions of health awareness to move beyond the explanatory power of neoliberalization of health, and turn to the work of Rachel Sanders, Annmarie Mol, and Donna Haraway as possible avenues for resisting optimization.

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“…In response, several public hearings on the proposed regulation were held, and disputes regarding enforcement by Puerto Rico's Department of Natural and Environmental Resources are ongoing, including in the form of demonstrations using the slogan "Una sola lucha" ["One Single Struggle"] to express the multiple, interrelated harms inflicted upon residents and the spaces where they live. Given these exigencies, while all people in Puerto Rico experience some form of toxic pollution with the ubiquity and banality of chemical exposures today, Jobos Bay communities live in an energy sacrifice zone (Pezzullo, 2014;Hernández, 2015;Lloréns, 2016;. More recently, in spring and summer 2021, environmental, community, agricultural, labor, religious, and other groups raised their voices to demand greater enforcement of penalties for illegal coal ash dumping and increased communication when communities have been exposed to coal ash, among other demands.…”

Section: Onísmentioning

confidence: 99%

“La justicia ambiental es para ti y para mí”: Translating Collective Struggles for Environmental and Energy Justice in Puerto Rico’s Jobos Bay Communities

Onís

2021

Front. Commun.

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Rural, coastal communities in the Jobos Bay region of southeastern Puerto Rico confront disproportionate harms as an energy sacrifice zone. This space is constituted by imported fossil fuel dependency, economic and climate injustices, environmental racism, ecocide, US colonialism and imperialism, neoliberalism, and racial capitalism. In response, many grassroots actors mobilize against the toxic assault on their communities to push for alternatives beyond the suffocating status quo via apoyo mutuo [mutual support]. This survival work and movement building occur literally in “the outdoors” and in other intertwined multispecies environments, challenging narrow, oppressive colonial, and consumerist constructs that reduce “the outdoors” to recreation and thus erase the numerous ways that people labor in, honor, and defend places and spaces to lead good lives. Thus, critical examinations of communication and race/racism/racialization in and about this colonial US territory must grapple with the brutalities and pain caused by systemic and structural cruelties and translate how, where, and with whom self-determined and potentially liberatory environmental and energy justice advocacy takes shape to refuse a trauma-only narrative. Studying these embodied and emplaced efforts positions energy and power broadly construed, including in the form of collective action. This article centers on the collaborative energies of local grassroots actors and scholars who ideologically and politically align and who value working together toward anti-colonial praxis. To provide one example of how these collaborations can yield public-facing projects that contribute to struggles tied to the survival and well-being of the most impacted communities, this essay focuses on the creation of an environmental justice children’s book. This bilingual text documents and translates the pollution caused by a US-owned, coal-fired power plant and mobilizations to topple this corporate invader. The article concludes by reflecting on some of the difficulties and possibilities that emerged during multi-year coalitional relationships that inform and exceed the children’s book. To reject racist and colonial dominant assumptions and discourses about outdoor spaces as only privileged recreational areas or as a “blank slate” devoid of people and culture, this project narrates how grassroots organizers and scholars persist in continued study and struggle for power(ful) transformations in Jobos Bay and beyond.

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Contaminated Children: Debating the Banality, Precarity, and Futurity of Chemical Safety

Cited by 13 publications

References 5 publications

Canary Science in the Mineshaft of the Anthropocene

Canary Science in the Mineshaft of the Anthropocene

The piety of optimization: The rhetoric of health awareness in ParticipACTION and Fitbit

“La justicia ambiental es para ti y para mí”: Translating Collective Struggles for Environmental and Energy Justice in Puerto Rico’s Jobos Bay Communities

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