Environmental racialisation and poetics of influence in the postgenomic era: fire, soil, spirit

Abstract

This article considers processes of environmental racialisation in the postgenomic era through their politics of difference and poetics of influence. Subfields like epigenetics promise to account for a plurality of possible influences on health outcomes. While this appears to present possibilities for historical reparation to communities whose epigenomes may have been chronically altered by histories of violence and trauma, the prevailing trend has been to compound processes of racialisation in the reproduction of good/bad environments. The postgenomic era has promised an epistemological transformation of ideas and values of human life, but its practices, technologies and ideology have so far prevented this. Epigenetics, rather, reproduces biomedical exclusions through imaginaries of embodied contexts, methods of occlusion and hypervisibility, and assignations of delay and deviance. This is more complex than both genetic reductionism and environmental racism: studies on epigenetics reveal a poetics of influence at work under liberal humanism complicit in the creation of death-worlds for racialised populations. Other experiments with life are possible and unfolding: Jay Bernard’s poem ‘Chemical’, set in the aftermath of London’s Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, unmoors its bodies from material environment, offering a spectral configuration of collective life. This configuration involves negotiating with the fixing of time and space on which genomic imaginaries depend.

Figuring Out Exposure: Exploring Computational Environments and Personalisation in Interdisciplinary Air Pollution Research

“…Linking bodies to environments in this way turns 'vulnerable bodies' into objects of knowledge through which significant influences of 'bad' environments can be measured in relation to a normative 'good' (Choksey 2021). In the case of this project, analytical algorithms are being developed to extract relations of interest from the material contexts of exposure (Amoore and Piotukh 2015).…”