Posted on

Iran’s Petrochemical Industry: A Disaster Zone of Precarity and Pollution

Peyman Jafari, Princeton University & International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam). During the last two decades, Iran has developed a significant petrochemical sector. Whenever it makes headlines, however, the reason is often international politics. In June 2019, for instance, the Trump administration imposed severe sanctions on the Persian Gulf Petrochemical Industries Company (PGPIC) due to … Continue reading Iran’s Petrochemical Industry: A Disaster Zone of Precarity and Pollution

Posted on

The Bahía Blanca Petrochemical Complex: Why I Have Made a Documentary Called “Ingeniero White: A Town They Are Killing”

María Giovis. In October 2017, the documentary “Ingeniero White: Un pueblo que están matando” was released, a documentary marked by an urgency to denounce. To denounce how they are killing my hometown: Ingeniero White. To me, this is the place of my earliest affections, dirt roads, the smell of the sea, beloved friends and family. … Continue reading The Bahía Blanca Petrochemical Complex: Why I Have Made a Documentary Called “Ingeniero White: A Town They Are Killing”

Posted on

How Small Data and Toxic Autobiographies Unearth the Limitations of the Italian Legislation on Industrial Risk: First Results from Gela, a Sicilian Petrochemical Town

Elisa Privitera, University of Catania. A General Overlook: Regulations about Risk, Democracy, and Socio-Environmental Injustice Catastrophic events have been direct and indirect triggers of policy changes concerning the assessment and mitigation of risk.[1] The Seveso Directives, which represent the main European laws on industrial risk, are an emblematic case since they were issued after the … Continue reading How Small Data and Toxic Autobiographies Unearth the Limitations of the Italian Legislation on Industrial Risk: First Results from Gela, a Sicilian Petrochemical Town

Posted on

Researching the Politics of Risk in Grangemouth and Ludwigshafen: Looking back to 2001

Peter Phillimore, Newcastle University. What led us nearly twenty years ago (in 2001) to undertake comparative ethnographic fieldwork in two centres renowned as hubs of the European chemical and petrochemical industry – Ludwigshafen in Germany, and Grangemouth in Scotland? What were the conversations and questions which led to this project? Our primary aim was to … Continue reading Researching the Politics of Risk in Grangemouth and Ludwigshafen: Looking back to 2001

Posted on

Afterlives of Orbital Infrastructures: From the Earth’s High Orbits to its High Seas

Rajji Desai, Harvard University. “We live in an age in which extremely expensive machines are made and installed in orbit without public knowledge, only to be spectacularly blown away and become total losses before our eyes.”  – Lisa Parks, “Orbital Ruins” (2013) As of 2019, the global space industry generates approximately 350 billion US dollars in revenue … Continue reading Afterlives of Orbital Infrastructures: From the Earth’s High Orbits to its High Seas

Posted on

Editorial: Environmental Justice in the Global South: Uneven Geographies of Extractivism, Industrial Pollution and Toxicity

David Brown, University of Warwick The environmental justice paradigm has its origins in the United States in the 1980s, as a social movement which aimed to tackle the uneven distribution of toxic waste sites and polluting industries located in minority and socio-economically deprived neighbourhoods. Much of the early environmental justice research focused efforts on issues, … Continue reading Editorial: Environmental Justice in the Global South: Uneven Geographies of Extractivism, Industrial Pollution and Toxicity

Posted on

The Global Petrochemical Map: Drawing the Political-Spatial Nexus of Petrochemical Production

David Brown and Lorenzo Feltrin, University of Warwick Introducing the Global Petrochemical Map In July this year, the Toxic Expertise team launched the pilot version of The Global Petrochemical Map. This public resource is a collaborative project that seeks to make petrochemical connections around the globe visible and to show the commonalities and differences in … Continue reading The Global Petrochemical Map: Drawing the Political-Spatial Nexus of Petrochemical Production