Health-environment futures: Complexity, uncertainty, and bodies

Senanayake, Nari; King, Brian

doi:10.1177/0309132517743322

Cited by 36 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“… Zavestoski et al’s (2004; 161) research into Guld War Syndrome for instance, has argued that these experiences of exclusion often give rise to new collective subjectivities and illness groups which contest ‘what they see as… unresponsive medical [legal, and bureaucratic] system[s]’ (also see Dumit, 2005 , Dumit, 2006 , Brown et al, 2011 ). As Senanayake and King (2019) argue, the intention of this work is to decentralize and potentially democratize knowledge production in response to uncertainty, challenging what counts as risk or harm and who gets to decide the terms and stakes involved.…”

Section: Taking Stock: Missed Opportunities and Multiple Lineagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geographies of uncertainty

Senanayake

King

2021

Geoforum

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The question of uncertainty has generated substantial critical engagements across the social sciences. While much of this literature falls within the domains of anthropology, science studies, and sociology, this short introductory paper highlights how geographical scholarship can also enrich emerging transdisciplinary debates on uncertainty. Specifically, we discuss how geographers engage with uncertainties produced through and reconfigured by some of the most formidable issues of our contemporary moment, including neoliberal transformation, disease and illness, resource conflict, global climate change, and ongoing struggles around knowledge, power, and justice. In conversation with debates in cognate fields, this special issue brings together contributions that grapple with uncertainty through key geographic concepts such as scale, power, spatiality, place, and human-environment relations. This work extends scholarly understanding of how uncertainty arises, is stabilized, and also how people navigate, experience, challenge, and rationalize uncertainty in everyday life. In doing so, we signal the immense potential offered by emerging intersections between human geography and broader critical social science interventions on the question of uncertainty.

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Section: Taking Stock: Missed Opportunities and Multiple Lineagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geographies of uncertainty

Senanayake

King

2021

Geoforum

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“…Exposure effects may be latent and accumulate, may not follow predictable cause and effect, may trouble distinctions between past and present, and as such are often uncertain. Within this work on temporalities, uncertainty suffuses efforts to draw causal pathways between exposure and response and is experienced in spatially uneven ways (Murphy, 2006;Senanayake and King, 2019). These temporal relationships are captured in notions of chemical infrastructures (Murphy, 2013), toxic landscapes (Lerner, 2010), and toxic infrastructures (Fortun, 2001), notions that explore the spatial and temporal extents and multi-scalar relationships between chemicals, bodies, and capital, where acute events and the slow erosion of industrial pollution force environments, communities, and bodies to live and weather its consequences across extended durations, sometimes permanently (Davies, 2018;Nixon, 2011).…”

Section: Infrastructure and Contaminationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political ecologies of infrastructural and intestinal decay

Bresnihan

Hesse

2020

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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In March 2007, when Cryptosporidium contaminated water supplies in Galway City, Ireland, political authorities responded quickly to upgrade water treatments plants. This response framed the crisis as a solely technical problem of infrastructural decay, obscuring legacies of urban and agricultural (over)development. In this paper, we examine dominant responses to infrastructural contamination that depoliticize and re-inscribe divisions among bodies, nature, infrastructure, rural and urban. The temporality of the Galway outbreak and the speedy response by the state is not replicated throughout Ireland. In parts of rural Roscommon, the neighbouring county to Galway, microbiological risks to the drinking water supply have been left unattended for more than eight years. The interplay of social, political, economic, and ecological factors produces uneven exposures to health risks that are situated within and mediated through water infrastructure. Drawing on postcolonial insights, the unevenness of infrastructural provision across Ireland does not just tell a story of exclusion and othering, but also provides space for different infrastructural projects to unfold. While the response to contamination within the public water supply replayed well-known technical fixes, the work of the National Federation of Group Water Schemes, the representative body of community managed water systems in rural Ireland, illustrates a different form of infrastructural practice that negotiates legacies of institutional abandonment and acknowledges the wider hydro-social cycle as part of, rather than ancillary to, water infrastructure. By blending political ecologies of health and postcolonial approaches to infrastructure, we analyse the unevenness of responses to infrastructural contamination and trace its relationship to legacies of uneven development and imaginaries of urban and rural Ireland.

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“…xenobiotics). In the context of NCDs, environmental toxicants might include: tobacco smoke, traffic‐related pollutants, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (from coal, tar or biomass burning), endrocrine‐disruptors, heavy metals and bioaerosols (Senanayake and King , Sly et al . ).…”

Section: Toxicity and The New Optics Of Ncdsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The optics of noncommunicable diseases: from lifestyle to environmental toxicity

Herrick

2020

Sociology Health & Illness

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Until recently, the noncommunicable disease (NCD) category was composed of four chronic diseases (cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and chronic respiratory disease) and four shared, ‘modifiable’ behavioural risk factors (smoking, diet, physical activity and alcohol). In late 2018, the NCD category was expanded to include mental health as an additional disease outcome and air pollution as an explicit environmental risk factor. The newly‐expanded NCD category connects behavioural and environmental readings of risk and shifts attention from individual acts of consumption to unequal and inescapable conditions of environmental exposure. It thus renders the increasing ‘toxicity’ of everyday life amid ubiquitous environmental contamination a new conceptual and empirical concern for NCD research. It also, as this paper explores, signals a new ‘optics’ of a much‐maligned disease category. This is particularly significant as chronic disease research has long been siloed between public and environmental health, with each discipline operationalising the notion of the ‘environment’ as a source of disease causation in contrasting ways. Given this, this paper is positioned as a significant contribution to both research on NCDs and environmental risk, bringing these interdisciplinary domains into a new critical conversation around the concept of toxicity.

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Health-environment futures: Complexity, uncertainty, and bodies

Cited by 36 publications

References 62 publications

Geographies of uncertainty

Geographies of uncertainty

Political ecologies of infrastructural and intestinal decay

The optics of noncommunicable diseases: from lifestyle to environmental toxicity

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