Garb, Yaakov;
Leblond, Nelly;
(2023)
Flowing toxics: E-waste field work in the Palestinian-Israeli space.
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space
10.1177/23996544231176923.
(In press).
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Abstract
We draw on several emerging literatures on contamination and waste and our own fieldwork on e-waste contamination in a Palestinian-Israeli border space to describe a “flowing” approach to toxic phenomena. We use this term as a shorthand to underscore the particular complexities of the socio-material-biological node called “toxics,” and the corresponding epistemic, methodological, and moral demands of studying them. Some episodes from typical days of field work assessing the dispersal of heavy metals from sites of e-waste burning illustrate our claims. Even this attempt to use straightforward techniques to measure the presence of an object of apparent elemental materiality was continually permeated and unsettled by the inescapable flowiness of toxics. Their sources, generation processes and fates were mobile and multiscalar, remarkably patchy heterogeneous and contingent in ways that mattered. At issue was not (just) inadequate knowledge, but the inescapably relational biophysical and social nature of toxics; their entanglement not only with the technical means, processes and definitions that make them perceptible, but with the multiple and often disjunct social contexts that allow, inform, and motivate attention and access to toxics sites, and the production of knowledge from them.
Type: | Article |
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Title: | Flowing toxics: E-waste field work in the Palestinian-Israeli space |
Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
DOI: | 10.1177/23996544231176923 |
Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231176923 |
Language: | English |
Additional information: | © The Author(s) 2023. Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC 4.0) This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
Keywords: | Pollution environmental justice slow violence, portable XRF, discard studies, Additional keywords: Lead (Pb), anthropogenic soils, electronic waste |
UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > Development Planning Unit |
URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10171383 |
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