Environment, Health, Justice…
Featured Image: A UNEP investigator assesses dozens of storage vessels for the toxic, carcinogenic and explosive missile fuel dimethylhydrazine that were abandoned by Soviet forces at a helicopter and scud missile base near Astana in Afghanistan. Credit: UNEP. Doug Weir, Toxic Remnants of War Project Armed conflict can generate significant levels of environmental pollution and … Continue reading Mapping the Toxic Remnants of War
Dr Daniel Renfrew, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, West Virginia University, USA. In 2011 residents of the small Uruguayan city of Minas (pop: 40,000) identified a disturbing trend. Loved ones, neighbors, and above all, children, adolescents and young adults, were coming down at seemingly alarming rates with various kinds of cancer- “strange cancers,” … Continue reading “We want to Know what we’re Breathing”: Cement Factories and Contested Environmental Illness in Minas, Uruguay
Miguel Ángel López-Navarro, Department of Business Administration and Marketing, Universitat Jaume I, Castelló, Spain My approach to studying the petrochemical industry, from a management perspective, is rooted in an interest in assessing how economic and environmental dimensions interact through the lens of the local community, in a petrochemical complex located in Castellón (Spain) a few … Continue reading The Petrochemical Complex as a Unit of Reference in Considering Companies’ Relationships with the Local Community
`Dr Cynthia Wang, Research Fellow, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, UK Sadly, it is not air but the air that is filled with substances and pollutants which we breathe in this modern world. We live and we breathe in this world surrounded by the substance called air. Formless, colourless and odourless, air flows around us … Continue reading Breathless in the Toxic Air
Professor Kate Brown, Professor of History, Department of History, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), USA This sentence in a document sent to Kiev a few months after the Chernobyl accident could read as criminal: “In the month of May [1986], the meat factories of Zhitomir, Korosten’, and Novograd-Volynsk processed livestock received from the 30-km zone … Continue reading The Berdichev Leather Factory in the Wake of the Chernobyl Accident
Dr Gwen Ottinger, Assistant Professor, Department of Politics, Drexel University, USA The EPA refinery rule thus marks a major victory in community groups’ decades-long struggle for ambient air monitoring at refinery fence lines… but without a way to translate new air quality information into action, communities risk being overwhelmed by data. On September 29, 2015, … Continue reading U.S. Oil Refineries Required to Monitor Ambient Air Toxics: A victory, with limits, for neighbouring communities
Dr Thom Davies, Research Fellow, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, UK @ThomDavies “The single most important challenge to the safety and protection of refugees arises from populist politics and toxic public debates” – Volker Türk, UNHCR’s Assistant High Commissioner for Protection (UN 2015) While conducting research this summer in the so-called ‘new Jungle’ in … Continue reading Toxic Life? The Slow Violence of refugee abandonment
