India Foster, Project Administrator, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, UK Background In 2004, Andy McGeechan led a local residents’ campaign to save twelve blocks of flats from demolition in a West Midlands city in the UK. Andy was and still is a resident of the North Coventry area of Hillfields which is located next to […]
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
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,”
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
`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
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
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,
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
Dr Cynthia Wang, Research Fellow, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, UK The issue of realizing the right to information is far greater than one hazardous substance. Baskut Tuncak, UN Special Rapporteur (2015) The shocking series of explosions at a hazardous goods warehouse occurred at the night of 12 August 2015, but since then Tianjin have
Dr Peter C. Little, Assistant Professor, Anthropology Department, Rhode Island College, USA A three hour drive northwest of New York City, in the Empire State’s Southern Tier region, is the small community of Endicott. Nestled along the Susquehanna River, it is known as the “Birthplace of IBM.” International Business Machines Corporation (IBM)—born of a marriage between the