Hosted by the Economy and Society Research Cluster, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. 

This roundtable aims to unsettle potentially restrictive framings of environmental justice in polluted communities and interrogate the implications of a focus on damages and on resistance to pollution. The mobilisation of some fenceline communities does not see the participation of all residents, but only of specific actors whose advocacy aligns with the framings of justice that fit mainstream discourse. 

While these voices do advocate for communities as wholes, in some cases they prevent dissonant experiences of pollution from emerging and shaping narratives and aspirations to justice (Tuck 2009). This risks reinforcing a form of epistemic injustice that is also connected to the perpetuation of slow and structural violence in affected communities (Davies 2019).

How do framings of environmental justice rooted in specific philosophical and activist traditions silence a broader spectrum of narratives on and engagements with pollution and justice? How might anthropological research support a more inclusive, anti-colonial (Liboiron 2021, Tuck and Yang 2012, Simpson 2004) understanding of entanglements with toxicity and activism? Building on the participants’ ethnographic research, this roundtable will unpack encounters with the toxic in fenceline communities to reflect on the configurations of power that shape and/or suppress particular narratives on and responses to pollution. The relationship of fenceline communities with pollution is characterized by experiential complexity: the struggle for everyday life does not frame pollution antagonistically, but rather as a normalised component of everyday life (Lora-Wainwright 2017, Auyero and Swistun 2008). These experiences lead to aspirations to justice that are premised on the recognition of the entanglement of chemical exposures with individual and collective life, as opposed to the measurement of chemical concentrations and damage to individual bodies (Shapiro and Kirksey 2017). This roundtable is designed to reflect on how the contextualization of this ‘alterlife’ (Murphy 2018) across different scales and temporalities may enable scholars and activists to address wider structural inequalities and think with as well as beyond local specificities.

Moving away from a harm-based approach to an understanding of pollution as embedded in processes of reproduction of power and justice is pivotal to also expanding notions of agency and action (Liboiron et al 2018). This decolonial approach to environmental justice multiplies conceptualisations of toxicity and surpasses the neoliberal framings that simultaneously animate the structures of power oppressing fenceline communities as well as the modes of knowledge production that are abided by in academia.

What, then, should the role of geographers, anthropologists and other social scientists be in shaping this dialogue? The panel will discuss avenues for the making of a public anthropology beyond toxic exposure as an entry point to remediate environmental injustice. This entails breaking up the notions of suffering, action, and advocacy from the scientific narrative on toxic exposure to enable geographies of the otherwise (Povinelli 2011). In doing so, the panel will also discuss strategies for engaging with communities, institutions, and other actors to overcome the epistemic tensions arising from rejecting scientific data on pollution as the route to address environmental injustice.