Review of Fractivism by Sara Wylie
Amanda Poole reviews Sara Wylie’s Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds.
Amanda Poole reviews Sara Wylie’s Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds.
Vasundhara Jairath reviews the book Life in Oil: Cofán Survival in the Petroleum Fields of Amazonia by Michael L. Cepek.
Nicholas Babin´s review of the book Organic Sovereignties by Guntra A. Aistara.
Anja Nygren reviews the 2017 book Green Wars: Colonization and Conservation in the Maya Forest by Megan Ybarra.
The author seeks to bring together environmental anthropology and history to frame the place of forests in humans’ lives, from a political ecology point of view. He does this by reflecting on his personal experiences in Northeast India, Kenya, and Sweden.
Triangulating narratives from a prospective mining site in northern Norway, Hugo Reinert works to identify (and render graspable) a particular effect of retroactive shock—tracing its resonance through experiences of chemical exposure, colonial racism, cultural erasure, and destruction of the built environment.
In this article, Sasha Litvintseva examines the history and materiality of asbestos to theorize toxic embodiment through the mutuality of the haptic sense and the breaching of boundaries of inside and outside. She develops this through an analysis of her own film project Asbestos (2016), shot at the mining town of Asbestos, Quebec.
In this selection of poems, Adam Dickinson focuses on the “outside” that is the “inside,” thereby drawing attention to the coextensive and intra-active nature of the body with its environment and the consequent implications for linking the human to the nonhuman and the personal to the global in environmental ethics.
Michael Marder interprets the “toxic flood” we are living or dying through as a global dump. On his reading, multiple levels of existence—from the psychic to the physiological, from the environmental-elemental to the planetary—are being converted into a dump, a massive and still growing hodgepodge of industrial and consumer by-products and emissions; shards of metaphysical ideas and theological dreams; radioactive materials; light, sound, and other modes of sensory pollution; pesticides and herbicides; and so forth.
Miriam Tola explores the entwinement of fascist biopolitics and the chemical industry at the site of the former chemical-textile plant Ex-SNIA Viscosa from the 1920s to the 1950s, and how this affected human and nonhuman bodies.