Toxic politics: Acting in a permanently polluted world

Abstract

Toxicity has become a ubiquitous, if uneven, condition. Toxicity can allow us to focus on how forms of life and their constituent relations, from the scale of cells to that of ways of life, are enabled, constrained and extinguished within broader power systems. Toxicity both disrupts existing orders and ways of life at some scales, while simultaneously enabling and maintaining ways of life at other scales. The articles in this special issue on toxic politics examine power relations and actions that have the potential for an otherwise. Yet, rather than focus on a politics that depends on the capture of social power via publics, charismatic images, shared epistemologies and controversy, we look to forms of slow, intimate activism based in ethics rather than achievement. One of the goals of this introduction and its special issue is to move concepts of toxicity away from fetishized and evidentiary regimes premised on wayward molecules behaving badly, so that toxicity can be understood in terms of reproductions of power and justice. The second goal is to move politics in a diversity of directions that can texture and expand concepts of agency and action in a permanently polluted world.

A State‐of‐the‐Art Review of Indigenous Peoples and Environmental Pollution

“…Part of the literature on IPs and pollution has framed pollution as a field of technical intervention, where impacts can often be curtailed or compensated, thereby relegating IPs to the status of helpless victims whose vulnerabilities should be remediated (Bagelman and Wiebe 2017; Nunn 2018). The depoliticization of pollution through the deployment of technical narratives (e.g., offering only technical solutions to problems that are fundamentally political) has rendered IPs' interests, agencies, and claims largely invisible (Cameron 2012; Liboiron et al 2018), often overlooking the proactive role of IPs in fighting against environmental injustices. A growing scholarly body is challenging this research tradition by showing how IPs actively contribute to develop innovative strategies to limit pollution or prevent it from the outset (Capasso 2017; Wehi and Lord 2017).…”

Care in Trouble: Ecologies of Support from Below and Beyond

“…Everywhere communities painstakingly hold together fragile connections, cultivate their consistency, and create the political conditions for life to endure (Liboiron et al. ; Shapiro ). They try their hands at what philosopher Isabelle Stengers () refers to as the art of the pharmakon .…”

Fables of Response-ability: Feminist Science Studies as Didactic Literature

“…In this context, feminist literature on chemical ecologies is didactic; by teaching their readers to become affected by relations we have learned to ignore, these authors "makes relations sensible" (Murphy, 2016) and create occasions for different kinds of response. As Liboiron, Tironi, and Calvillo (2018) argue: "A permanently polluted world is one that, because of its deep alteration, reclaims the need to incite new forms of response-ability" (p. 332).…”