Women's and Mothers' Strategies for Coping with Contested Environmental Illness

• In Event: 50620 - Section on Environmental Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4: Embodied Environments and Environmental Agency

Abstract

Research on the experiences of individuals with environmental illnesses has explored how, faced with contestation over the etiology of their disease, sufferers grapple with how to cope with their conditions. For many, this process of meaning-making involves participation in activism around embodied health experiences that seeks to validate links between illness and contamination. However, less attention has been devoted to the particular experiences of women and mothers impacted by contested environmental illness, especially outside the context of collective action. I draw on in-depth interviews with women impacted by two North Carolina cancer clusters (n=36) to address this gap. I use women’s experiences of environmental illness to examine practices of everyday resilience which, rather than attempting to bring polluters to justice through acts traditionally understood as everyday resistance, draws on an ethic of care in which personal healing and meaning-making is intimately tied to supporting and protecting others from environmental illness.

Author

• Landen Longest, North Carolina State University