Make it Safe, Make it Past

• In Event: Time-Scapes of Toxicity (1): Making Boundaries

Abstract

Asbestos in the United States is the stuff of daytime television commercials: lawyers for class action mesothelioma cases reach out to older retired workers who may have worked in “past” industries and settings like shipyards with high exposures to the now known carcinogen. But asbestos is still quite present. In the late industrial town, Ambler, Pennsylvania, during my fieldwork from 2009-2014, residents, activists, and scientists gathered to contend with large amounts of asbestos containing material located in dump sites and throughout the area, remnants of local manufacturing. Activists talked of the need to “make asbestos a problem again” in order to make the area safe. Government scientists responded by working to differentiate occupational exposure pathways of the past, from potential environmental pathways of the present or future. Both groups played the same temporal boundary-work game: in an effort to define and enact “safety,” and set in motion new development, they worked to locate toxicity in a sealed apart category of the past, separate from present and future. In contrast, I highlight the theorizing done by long-term residents who pushed against this assumption, noting instead a ‘present past.’ I argue that the scientific and activist efforts to locate risk temporally were part of the techniques of enacting safety, and highlight the broader stakes – and who was included and excluded from these imagined and enacted 'safe futures'- in the process.

Author

• Britt Dahlberg, Science History Institute