Chemical Agents

Abstract

This article reviews interdisciplinary toxicity literature, building from Gerald E. Markowitz and David Rosner’s “deceit and denial” and Phil Brown’s “contested illnesses” to argue for a third, more critical analytic that I term “empire and empirics.” Deceit and denial pit corporate actors against antitoxins advocates, while contested illnesses highlight social movements. Empire and empirics center the role of imperialism in reproducing today’s unevenly distributed toxic exposures. I find this third path the most generative because the products and the production of science—toxicants and toxicology—are situated in their sociohistorical, politico-economic, ecological, and affective contexts. Revealing the imperialist logics embedded into dominant ontoepistemology also illuminates alternative, liberatory pathways toward more environmentally just futures. I close with examples of “undisciplined” action research, highlighting scholar-practitioners who study toxicity with care and in nonhierarchical collaboration. While undisciplining is challenging, its potential for realizing environmental justice far outweighs the difficulties of doing science differently.

Global containments and local leakages: Structural violence and the toxic flows of shipbreaking

“…Toxic substances are produced through, and by, capitalist processes. When ships are traded as scrap to be taken apart for their steel – the hazardous materials they contain 'leak, ooze, and persist' into the environment, humans, and more-than-human entities (Packer 2021). Toxic residues from shipbreaking sites travel with the waters, tides, and sediments: they are ‘transgressive and disobey boundaries’ (Boudia et al 2018, 167).…”