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(L-R: Lucy Sabin, Andrew Barry, Emilie Glazer, Mariana Rios Sandoval, Noemi Toussignant, Liz Roberts, Michelle Murphy, Anita Hardon, Raffaele Ippolito)
Chemical Exposures London workshop – 14-15th March 2023 - creating synergies for collaboration
The UCL Anthropocene Chemical Exposures reading group held their second hybrid workshop event in London in March. It was a wonderful opportunity to share and exchange research and thoughts that had begun in the virtual reading group in 2019 and to build on our first workshop event in June 2022 as we move towards bringing together an edited collection on Chemical Exposures with UCL Press.
We were fortunate to have Michelle Murphy from the University of Toronto with us for the event who offered generous and insightful comments throughout, as did colleagues from UCL, other UK universities, and international researchers, including Liz Roberts from the University of Michigan, Anita Hardon and Mariana Rios Sandoval from the University of Wageningen. Our discussions centred around previously circulated papers (and also a number of film clips), proved to be wonderfully generative and engaging; a format which enabled us to use the time to delve deeply into the topics raised and to think about the synergies that linked research that we discussed.
This included community and activism in the context of urban pesticide exposure in the UK, how ‘intergenerational time’ aligns chemical exposure from carbon emissions in Norway, or is related to water quality in Palestine and urban pollution in Portugal, how and in what ways life is sustained in the post-industrial peripheries of Paris, the scope and limits of collaboration in counting household chemicals in Mexico, how isotopes are both ‘forms and witnesses’ of chemical exposure, how concepts of air quality and sampling can be made more experiential and relational, the relevance of ‘endemic toxicities’ in thinking about ‘residues of extraction’ in Senegal, how to think with ‘harm reduction’ in the understudied and underregulated context of ‘cumulative chemical toxicities’ of everyday living and the how environmental crisis is navigated as a moral issue against the changing political fragmentation of community in the South of Italy.
Dinner at Ciao Bella in Bloomsbury sitting outside in the relatively mild March evening consolidated the social exchanges as did a vigorous ‘walking seminar’ on Hampstead Heath on the second day of our workshop, rounding off with tea and cake in Andrew Barry’s north London home. It is true to say that seeds have been well and truly sown and are now flourishing following this workshop as we move towards progressing our plans for a UCL Press edited volume on Chemical Exposures.