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Environmental (Un)Knowing: Exploring the nexus of epistemic and environmental injustice

Datum
29. Sep­tem­ber 2022 

This lec­ture explores the ongo­ing and trans­for­ma­tive nexus of tox­ic e‑waste labor, envi­ron­men­tal health sci­ence, and envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice in neolib­er­al Ghana.


17 organ­ised by the Leib­niz-Zen­trum Mod­ern­er Ori­ent (ZMO) in Berlin.

Thurs­day 29 Sep­tem­ber 2022, 17.00 – 18.30 (CEST)

Peter C. Lit­tle (Rhode Island Col­lege)

Tox­ic Epis­temics and E‑Waste Jus­tice Strug­gle in Ghana

This lec­ture explores the ongo­ing and trans­for­ma­tive nexus of tox­ic e‑waste labor, envi­ron­men­tal health sci­ence, and envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice in neolib­er­al Ghana. Glob­al health stud­ies of work­ers engaged in e‑waste recy­cling and scrap met­al extrac­tion have focused on the Glob­al South in gen­er­al, and Ghana in par­tic­u­lar, to expand envi­ron­men­tal health sci­ence and knowl­edge, build inter­na­tion­al net­works of exper­tise, and gen­er­ate evi­dence-based knowl­edge to improve pub­lic health out­comes or inform waste man­age­ment pol­i­cy. Amidst these devel­op­ments, cer­tain tox­ic epis­temics go unchecked. Many of these techno­science projects and part­ner­ships often over­look or down­play the pol­i­tics of knowl­edge extrac­tion or sim­ply reduce e‑waste work­ers to bod­ies that bioac­cu­mu­late harm­ful lev­els of tox­ic sub­stances (e.g., lead, cop­per, cad­mi­um). The ques­tion is, what does this e‑waste techno­science silence in the process? This lec­ture explores these tox­ic epis­temics and how they inter­sect with crit­i­cal envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice the­o­ry and action.

Peter Lit­tle is Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor and Chair of the Anthro­pol­o­gy Depart­ment at Rhode Island Col­lege in Prov­i­dence, Rhode Island (USA). He is author of Tox­ic Town: IBM, Pol­lu­tion, and Indus­tri­al Risks (NYU Press, 2014) and Burn­ing Mat­ters: Life, Labor, and E‑Waste Pyropol­i­tics in Ghana (Oxford, 2022). His cur­rent book project is enti­tled Plat­forms, Patholo­gies, and Plun­der: Crit­i­cal Zones of Technopow­er and Glob­al Polit­i­cal Ecol­o­gy (Lex­ing­ton Books). He is also the pres­i­dent-elect of the North­east­ern Anthro­po­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion.

The event will take place in hybrid for­mat. Those in Berlin are wel­come to join us at ZMO: https://www.zmo.de/en/contact

For online par­tic­i­pa­tion via Zoom, please reg­is­ter using this link: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYkdeqrpz8pEtGTYF2wQbw5CG2yjEDG79Fc