Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Society for Cultural Anthropology

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Teachers of Anthropology in Community Colleges, Students, Those Involved in Mentoring Activities

Primary Theme: Environment and Environmental Inequality

Secondary Theme: Technology

(3-0550) Temporalities of Toxicities

From the suddenness of industrial accidents to the long durée of radiologically contaminated landscapes, toxicities refract and diffract across entangled and shifting temporal scales, saturating bodies and ecologies. Toxicities can evoke chronopolitical speculation about future possibilities for remediation or decay, precarious anxieties about possible threats to life and liveliness, calls for justice among the exposed, and biopolitical contentions about how to circumscribe and regulate allowable levels of risk. Toxicities can be tensed historically as inheritances from past exploitations, mobilized politically to oppose future extraction or military-industrial activity, or lurk in the slow violence of an already contaminated everyday. The authors in this session explore how diverse toxins/toxicities - chemical, biological, radiological, and interpersonal - can converge and propagate simultaneously, within the intersecting time horizons of politics, finance, ecosystems, governance, medicine, activist opposition, and work. The panelists engage these questions ethnographically: among U.S. nuclear weapons waste experts grappling with unanticipated chemical reactions; through a Baltimore neighborhood with a 200-year history of exposure to petrochemicals; among residents of a Bulgarian town known for its Soviet-built nuclear power plant; in a Japanese evidentiary regime for post-Fukushima radiation science; and within communities subjected to 40-years of Soviet nuclear testing in Kazakhstan.

Presenter(s)

• Chloe Ahmann

  Collegiate Assistant Professor
  University of Chicago

• Maxime Polleri

  York University

• Elana Resnick

  University of California, Santa Barbara

Chair(s)

• Vincent Ialenti

  MacArthur Postdoctoral Fellow
  George Washington University

Presenter(s)

• Vincent Ialenti

  MacArthur Postdoctoral Fellow
  George Washington University

Organizer(s)

• Magdalena Stawkowski

  North Carolina State University

Presenter(s)

• Magdalena Stawkowski

  North Carolina State University

Discussant(s)

• Daniel Renfrew

  Associate Professor
  West Virginia University

Presentations:

• 10:15 AM - 10:30 AM

  “You can’t see toxics, but you can be very agitated about blowing up”: Abandoning Temporalities of Toxicity
  Chloe Ahmann – University of Chicago
• 10:30 AM - 10:45 AM

  Phantomatic Evidence – Fukushima and the Time-Scape Politics of Radiation Harm
  Maxime Polleri – York University
• 10:45 AM - 11:00 AM

  Assessing Toxicity and Imagining the Future of Nuclear Infrastructure in Bulgaria
  Elana F. Resnick – University of California, Santa Barbara
• 11:00 AM - 11:15 AM

  Waste Makes Haste: Future Wildfires, Bad Kitty Litter, and the Temporal Politics of a New Mexico Nuclear Waste Accident
  Vincent Ialenti – George Washington University
• 11:15 AM - 11:30 AM

  Authoritarian Science and the Search for Ideal Research Populations
  Magdalena Edyta Stawkowski – North Carolina State University
• 11:30 AM - 11:45 AM

  Discussion
  Daniel E. Renfrew – West Virginia University