Datum
23. April – 24. April 2025
CfP for a panel at Environment, and Anthropology (HEAT) Conference, Durham, UK
Call for abstracts to a panel on „Scaling toxic exposure; intergenerational responsibility, care and planetary health”
Health, Environment, and Anthropology (HEAT) Conference
Durham University (UK)
April 23–24, 2025
The call is scheduled to close on 13 January
If you are interested, please submit an abstract via the Abstract Management portal. The website includes guidance on how papers should be submitted and a drop down list of panels a proposer can select from.
Details: Scaling toxic exposure; intergenerational responsibility, care and planetary health
Chemical exposure and their potential toxic arrangements are intergenerational, crossing lines of kinship and connecting relations to molecules, multiple bodies, ecologies and social spaces through non-linear temporalities. This presents significant challenges for ethnographic research confronting scales of exposure in the context of planetary health, escalating climate and ecological crises, profound inequality, and ongoing colonial formations. In military campaigns devastating lives, genocide brings ecocide. There is a need to examine the novel configurations of intergenerational responsibility, justice and care which arise at these junctures, as they index possibilities for other ways of life. This requires creative orientations to method, concepts and theory to address the complex temporal and spatial scales of toxic exposure.
Our panel seeks contributions from those engaging with chemical exposures and questions of intergenerational time and social relations within anthropology and/or in dialogue with other disciplines and those addressing the methodological challenges and conceptual approaches related to these themes.
Our panel is guided but not limited to the following questions:
-How can intergenerational chemical exposure be examined given that temporality of toxicity is not linear?
‑What are the possibilities for action – for ourselves as researchers, for our research communities, and for wider groups entangled in these landscapes – if conventional mechanisms of causality do not apply?
‑If the materiality and latency of chemical exposure articulates an absence in the present how can we examine the pervasive and elusiveness of toxicity?
‑What kinds of ethnographic (re)orientations are required to critically orient to the multiple temporalities of chemical toxicity? What can the work of comparison facilitate in examining scales of toxic exposure?