Alice Mah, Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick I have been researching the petrochemical industry for more than five years now. Day in and out, this behemoth industry, with its toxicity, controversies, and sprawling network of activities around the globe, has been looming in the back of my mind. Whenever I am gripped by an … Continue reading Special Issue: Making the Petrochemical Connection
Chris Waite, University of Warwick When Alexander von Humboldt reached the peak of El Teide in June 1799, he described how the ‘prodigious transparency of the atmosphere’ contributed to ‘the magical effect’ of Tenerife’s landscape1. Humboldt was on route to what would become an extraordinary Latin American expedition that saw him scale higher peaks than … Continue reading Santa Cruz Verde 2030: A new dawn for Tenerife?
Dr Thomas Verbeek, University of Warwick @thverbeek In our contemporary globalized economy, it is increasingly complex to disentangle the relationships between different places, different companies and different products. Through global production networks, globally operating conglomerates, global elite networks as well as through all kinds of inter-firm alliances such as joint ventures and license agreements, different … Continue reading Places of decision and flows of power: Disentangling petrochemical corporate networks
Dr. David Brown, University of Warwick @browndee17 In recent years, a backlash against plastics has been observed in the public sphere, with plastics as a commodity seen to be losing its ‘social licence’. Plastic waste has emerged as an environmental crisis in public discourse, considered to be pervasive and indomitable. According to the UN (2017), … Continue reading The Existential Crisis of the Petrochemical Industry and Discourses of Sustainability: Reflections from the 34th World Petrochemical Conference
Dr Calvin Jephcote, University of Warwick Petroleum has been the fuel for dramatic change in the twentieth century, as a source of energy it has revolutionised transport and powered technological advances, but as a chemical it has also enabled humankind to engineer synthetic environments. The petrochemical industry was initially created from the desire to commoditise … Continue reading Petrochemical Landscapes: A European Perspective
Dr Lorenzo Feltrin, University of Warwick @lorenzo_feltrin This year marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of Quando il potere è operaio: Autonomia e soggettività politica a Porto Marghera (1960-1980) (edited by Devi Sacchetto and Gianni Sbrogiò, 2009, Roma: Manifestolibri), translatable as “When Power is Workers’ Power: Autonomy and Political Subjectivity in Porto Marghera (1960-1980)”. … Continue reading Book Review: Quando il potere è operaio: Autonomia e soggettività politica a Porto Marghera (1960-1980)
Sarah Marie Wiebe (University of Hawai’i, Mānoa) Jen Bagelman (University of Exeter, United Kingdom) Laurence Butet-Roch (Ryerson University) I didn’t Know! Poem by Ada Lockridge Aamjiwnaang First Nation I didn’t Know that we had a say on what goes on in the plants I didn’t Know what was being released or how much or the … Continue reading Bodies Exposed: Reframing the Geopolitics of Dilution in Canada’s Chemical Valley
Angelo Raffaele Ippolito (United Nations University – International Institute for Global Health) Bruno Andreas Walther (National Sun Yat-Sen University) Between 2017 and 2018, I carried out ethnographic fieldwork in the Southern Italian city of Taranto. Being from the city myself, I was aware of the ongoing struggle between a small group of active citizens and … Continue reading Contaminated Morals: the Struggle of Industrial Pollution in a Southern Italian City
Yu-Rong Joy Liu, University of Arizona, Tucson Sitting across a tea table in the living room, a local official shared her thoughts on my question about Shanxi Province’s image as a coal producing province in people’s mind: “You should write about how we overcome air pollution, and that the sky is so much clearer than … Continue reading Sacrificing and Saving the Environment: The Case of Shanxi
In this Special Issue of Toxic News we explore different ways of making pollution visible: Dr Thom Davies, Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick @ThomDavies The Hungarian photographer Robert Capa once said: ‘if your photographs are not good enough, you aren’t close enough’. He was a war photographer and famously captured … Continue reading Editorial: Toxic Visions – Photography and Pollution
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