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Ippolito, Raffaele; Sale, Carmen; Jokela-Pansini, Maaret
doi: 10.1057/s41292-025-00364-3pmid: 41255479
This article examines environmental narratives amidst chronic industrial pollution across three generations in Taranto, Italy. Drawing on ethnographic research with residents positioned in different historical periods, we show how each generation’s understanding of toxicity is intimately tied to shifting economic conditions, political interventions, and embodied experiences in Taranto’s polluted landscape. The first generation, closely tied to state-led industrial development, recalls their experience of pride and modernity. The second generation is faced with growing scientific evidence on industrial pollution and institutional scrutiny: they make sense of toxicity by questioning the promise of prosperity that the industrial development and resulting modernity offered. The youngest generation, who grew amid persistent environmental degradation, creates a narrative of pollution as a given dimension of everyday life and one that calls forth community cohesion. By highlighting these intergenerational narratives and their ongoing renegotiations, we shed light on how wellbeing and care are assembled, reworked, and contested over time. In doing so, this paper contributes to more heterogeneous understandings of environmental justice and the ways communities live through, and make sense of, industrial harm.
Lou, Loretta Ieng Tak; Lora-Wainwright, Anna Lisa
doi: 10.1057/s41292-025-00358-1pmid: 41255478
This article examines the potentials and limitations of the concept of “chemosociality” (Shapiro and Kirksey, Cultural Anthropology 32:481–493, 2017) through a case study of Emerald, an environmental NGO addressing pollution in China’s chemical industry. Based on fieldwork and online research conducted since 2016, the article explores how chemosociality provides a lens to move beyond binary views of a homogeneous frontline community battling against toxic industries. However, it argues that chemosociality alone is insufficient to account for the unevenness of community engagement in environmental advocacy. Drawing on Bradley’s concept of biosolidarity (Bradley, Anthropology & Medicine 28:543–557, 2021), the article introduces chemosolidarity and ecosolidarity to highlight Emerald’s efforts to foster public participation. While Emerald’s attempts to cultivate chemosolidarity were unsuccessful, they nurtured ecosolidarity, grounded in a shared appreciation of nature. This example underscores the need to differentiate between sociality and solidarity and to pay attention to affective rather than effective participation to gain a more nuanced understanding of environmental justice and the complexities of toxicity and environmental advocacy.
doi: 10.1057/s41292-025-00357-2pmid: N/A
Drawing on the Foucauldian notion of regimes of truth, this paper introduces the idea of regimes of toxicity as different forms of knowledge and discourses on toxicity. Furthermore, inspired by critical studies on toxicity, I posit that the dominant regime of toxicity ignores the time bomb of toxicants, which causes terrible anxiety for those who have been exposed, or what I call chemo-anxiety. Former Taiwan RCA workers have faced such anxiety. Their struggle for recognition of the full consequences of their past exposure to a panoply of toxicants presents a formidable challenge to the dominant episteme on toxicity and the violence imposed on the victims. Remarkably, their three decades of mobilization and twenty years of litigation have led to a historic first: the Taiwan Supreme Court’s acknowledgment of not only the cancer and other severe illnesses, but also the psychological stress they have suffered as a result of past exposure to toxicants.
doi: 10.1057/s41292-025-00370-5pmid: N/A
This article explores the unexpected connections that emerge between lithium mining plans in Serbia and two mass shootings on the 3rd and 4th of May 2023. The 3rd of May event was the first school shooting in the history of the wider region, becoming for many Serbians a manifestation of systemic issues rather than an isolated event, and resulting in the formation of a massive protest movement. The Jadar Project was set to become the biggest lithium mine in Europe, yet it has attracted widespread resistance across the country, resulting in its cancellation in January 2022, which was, however, nullified two and a half years later. Drawing on ethnographic and activist engagement with communities affected by lithium exploration in Serbia, this article explores how the two protest movements intersected around the question of violence. I theorise ‘violent politics' as encompassing multiple and shifting forms of violence that arise between lithium extractivism and the shootings and beyond, arguing for the need to conceptually connect various forms of violence. Moving beyond understanding violence through isolated events then problematises the binary thinking between chronic and acute violence, or material and immaterial toxicity, instead revealing it as fluid and porous—yet still being resisted.
doi: 10.1057/s41292-025-00363-4pmid: N/A
Through an ethnographic study of snakebite governance in Kerala, India, this article argues that social scientific theories of toxicity elucidate the biosocial dimensions of snakebite envenomation (SBE). SBE is a medical emergency engendered by the toxins in a venomous snakebite. By drawing upon work from the social sciences and humanities that conceives of the material and semiotic dimensions of biological toxins (such as venom and poison) and synthetic toxicants (such as industrial contaminants) in an integrated frame of toxicity, this article demonstrates how these theories clarify the structural drivers, indeterminacies, and multispecies health impacts that characterise SBE’s manifestation as a public health issue in Kerala. It thus asserts the value of integrating insights drawn from analyses of toxicity across biological and synthetic molecules, responding to recent influential reviews that omit biological toxins from this frame due to their supposed natural genesis and constrained circulation and harms. This article consequently argues that scholars should avoid reproducing rigid taxonomic distinctions between ‘natural’ toxins and ‘synthetic’ toxicants, as insights drawn from across classes of molecules and mobilised within a unified heuristic of toxicity elucidate the structural conditions and localised experiences of toxin and toxicant exposure.
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