Toxic Space and Time: Slow Violence, Necropolitics, and Petrochemical Pollution

Defiance from Down River: Deflection and Dispute in the Urban-Industrial Metabolism of Pollution in Guadalajara

“…This brief narration of the politics and discourses around water pollution and flooding in Las Pintas allows us to demonstrate how toxic waters and floods are produced by diverse actors and how the state opts to divert attention towards historically disadvantaged groups, constructing a public discourse that revictimizes and bolsters socioecological inequalities [73,75,124]. In this context, many residents blame themselves, identifying polluted canals and floods as the unwanted corollaries of their bad habits.…”

Accumulated Injuries of Environmental Injustice: Living and Working with Petrochemical Pollution in Nanjing, China

“…The health effects of exposure to toxic petrochemicals include cancer, respiratory illnesses, and neurological damage (World Health Organization 2014). The negative social, health, and environmental effects of the petrochemical industry on "fenceline" communities around the world have been widely researched, from the petrochemical corridors of "Cancer Alley" in Louisiana in the United States, to "Cancer Valley" in Sarnia, Ontario, to urban slums in Argentina (Allen 2003;Auyero and Swistun 2009;Bullard and Wright 2009;Wiebe 2016;Davies 2018). In particular, researchers and activists have focused on the environmental justice and health struggles of black, indigenous, and minority ethnic populations who inhabit these polluted communities.…”

“…The notion of accumulation also has an important temporal dimension, which is particularly relevant for studies of toxic geographies. As Murphy (2013, 107) argued, the effects of toxic hazards often accumulate over generations, allowing past pollution to "defer its violence to the present" (see also Davies 2018).…”

“…In this article, we consider everyday forms of environmental injustice, through analyzing accumulated injuries of living and working in polluted petrochemical areas with severe yet normalized toxic exposures. Accumulated injuries relate to the "slow violence" (Nixon 2011;Davies 2018) of environmental devastation that occurs in the everyday lives of poor and marginalized communities, beyond the media spectacle surrounding large disasters and protests. These manifest as unequal, multilayered, social effects of living and working in polluted environments in China, within a periurban industrial context.…”

The Impossibility of a Future in the Absence of a Past: Drifting in the In-Between

“…Drift on this road is the tumbling of leaves, weeds, dust, and wind; further, it is debris-plastic bags, beer cans, chip packages, diapers, spare tires, washing machines-all gathered together in heaps, assemblages of both waste and opportunity. In this way, we can imagine drift also as an assemblage, an accumulation of garbage dumps, clear cuts, and reserves and, further, of abandoned plantations, wastelands designed to contain the detritus of colonial administrations (see, for example, Davies 2018, Hoover 2017, Keeling & Sandlos, 2015, Murphy 2017, Nunn 2018, Simmons 2017).…”