Pollution Comes Home and Gets Personal: Women's Experience of Household Chemical Exposure

Abstract

We report on interviews conducted with participants in a novel study about environmental chemicals in body fluids and household air and dust. Interviews reveal how personal and collective environmental history influence the interpretation of exposure data, and how participants fashion an emergent understanding of environmental health problems from the articulation of science and experience. To the illness experience literature, we contribute a framework for analyzing a new category of embodied narratives-"exposure experience"-that examines the mediating role of science. We update social scientific knowledge about social responses to toxic chemicals during a period in which science alters public understanding of chemical pollution. This article is among the first published accounts of participants' responses to learning personal exposure data, research identified as critical to environmental science and public health. Our findings raise the importance of reporting even uncertain science and underscore the value of a community-based reporting strategy.Science increasingly contributes to how people discover and understand environmental problems (Murphy 1997), both aside from and in addition to their embodied or direct experience. Biomonitoring science and personal exposure assessment, which measures environmental chemicals 1 in the human body and household air and dust, is one example where

Participatory Air Monitoring in the Midst of Uncertainty: Residents’ Experiences with the Speck Sensor

“…al 2011;Altman et al 2008). While exposures are experienced physically, they are also inflected by socially produced uncertainties-a lack of clear information from !…”

‘Wannabe Toxic-Free?’ From precautionary consumption to corporeal citizenship

“…First, Altman et al (2008) describe how individuals, as consumers, believe they can prevent chemical exposures by avoiding certain products. According to the authors, this belief is a 'consumption fallacy' because it is based on the notion 'that consumer choice is un-bounded, when [in fact] the range of options consumers have to reduce exposure to chemicals like phthalates or flame retardants is limited ' (2008, p. 426).…”

“…MacKendrick (2015) has noted the individualized orientation of precautionary consumption, in line with earlier critiques of green or ethical consumerism (Sandilands 1993). Other critics have pointed to the starkly gendered dimensions of precautionary consumption, noting how advocacy organizations often place responsibility for contaminant avoidance on women, especially young mothers (Altman et al 2008, MacKendrick 2014, MacKendrick and Stevens 2016. Further, there are indications that precautionary consumption could be an ineffective way to reduce exposures to everyday toxics: in other words, it may not even be possible to 'shop our way out' of this problem.…”

Taking care: Anticipation, extraction and the politics of temporality in autism science

“…The emergent quality of these investigations reflects how relationships between science participation, expertise and sociality are influenced by the temporal politics of research (see Brown et al, 2004;Altman et al, 2008;Rabinow, 2008). Furthermore, through their focus on expectant mothers and research teams made up almost exclusively of women, the studies I follow also reflect the gendered dimensions of care and the less often acknowledged forms of affective and material labor that support scientific research (see also Parrenas and Boris, 2010 on intimate labor).…”