Ignorance and Illegible Subjects of Toxicity: The Case of PFOA Contamination in Hoosick Falls, New York

• In Event: Toxic Subjects: Historical, Legal, Occupational, and Medical Perspectives - I

Abstract

In late 2015, residents of Hoosick Falls, New York, learned that their drinking water was contaminated by perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). Despite the longer history of PFOA in manufacturing in the United States and the likely use of PFOA in local factories since the 1960s, Hoosick Falls’ contamination was not discovered during routine regulatory processes or investigations, but was instead uncovered by a concerned resident. Using an interdisciplinary and mixed methods approach that triangulates historical analysis, policy analysis, and discourse analysis, this paper willexamine how PFOA contamination in Hoosick Falls was rendered illegible to and by regulatory systems for decades.

Tuana (2006) has observed the different ways in which ignorance is produced, calling for “epistemologies of ignorance” to study those means of production (2). The work of STS and Agnotology scholars has, however, tended to focus on creating typologies of knowledge/ignorance or identifying new types of ignorance with a singular motive, means, or agent of its production. In contrast, the case of Hoosick Falls’ PFOA contamination reflects how the co-production of ignorances – including: unseen science (Richter et al, 2018), incommensurate science(Rabinow, forthcoming), and strategic science translations(Cordner, 2015) – across scale by both industry and regulatory actors worked to render residents and their community as illegible subjects of toxicity. This case thus points towards the need to consider ignorance as an inter-scalar and multi-layered co-production, to understand what considering it as such might lend to rendering toxic subject as legible, and to further answering the call for ‘epistemologies of ignorance’.

Author

• Laura Rabinow, RPI