Suchergebnisse

The Anthropocene has arrived riding a wave of pollution. From ";forever chemicals"; to oceanic garbage patches, human-made chemical compounds are seemingly everywhere. Concerned about how these compounds disrupt multiple lives and ecologies, environmental scholars, activists, and affected communities have sought to curb the causes of pollution, focusing especially on the extractive industries. In Worlds of Gray and Green, authors Sebastián Ureta and Patricio Flores challenge us to rethink extraction as ecological practice. Adopting an environmental humanities analytic lens, Ureta and Flores offer a rich ethnographic exploration of the waste produced by Chile's El Teniente, the world's largest underground mine. Deposited in a massive dam, the waste—known as tailings—engages with human and non-human entities in multiple ways through a process the authors call geosymbiosis. Some of these geosymbioses result in toxicity and damage, while others become the basis of lively novel ecologies. A particular kind of power emerges in the process, one that is radically indifferent to human beings but that affects them in many ways. Learning to live with geosymbioses offers a tentative path forward amid ongoing environmental devastation

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich. ; This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively. ; This article starts by reviewing the setbacks that the recent Science and Technology Studies literature has identified in the functioning of technologies of democracy, the different arrangements that look to enact deliberation on technoscientific issues. Putting a focus on the Citizen Consensus Conference, it then proposes that several of these setbacks are related to the kind of "work" that these technologies are expected to do, identifying two kinds of it: performing a laboratory-based experiment and constituting a platform for the dissemination of facts. It then applies this framework to study a Citizen Consensus Conference carried out in Chile in 2003. After a detailed genealogy of the planning, implementation and afterlife of this exercise, the article concludes that several of the limitations experienced are derived from a "successful outcome" conceived as solely running a neat lab-based experiment, arguing for the need to incorporate its functioning as a platform with all the associated transformations and messiness. ; BMBF, 01UU0906, Innovation in Governance

With the emergence of global mechanism for toxic harm accountability, a transnational environmental justice regime is slowly rising. One of the ways in which its taking form is through transnational litigation schemes where corporations are being locally sued by the alleged victims of their overseas misbehaviours. Using a science and technology studies approach, this article deals with one of the most central components of those schemes: victimization devices. Such concept refers to the highly varied sociotechnical assemblages through which claims about toxic victimhood are mobilized in litigation-based schemes, usually including components such as toxicological evidence and testimonies from the affected people. In order to explore the complexities involved in transnationally mobilizing these devices, this article analyses the lawsuit presented in Sweden by inhabitants of Arica, Chile, against the local mining corporation Boliden for its alleged responsibility in dumping toxic waste near their homes in the late 1980s.