Symptom and Society: The Politics of Postindustrial Residues

• In Event: Residues: Rethinking Chemical Environments - III

Abstract

Data about toxicity can both conceal and reveal broader inequalities. What does it mean to identify places, selves, and communities with the toxic residues left by industrialization? Drawing from research conducted with frontline healthcare workers and residents in Flint, Michigan, a postindustrial Rustbelt city experiencing high lead levels in its municipal drinking water, this paper examines how efforts to define toxic harm in relation to a single chemical, lead, recast crises precipitated by neoliberalism, deindustrialization, and racism into a narrow regulatory vocabulary. I argue that epidemiological strategies of lead detection—and the medicolegal recognition of this knowledge—translate social insecurities into imprecise behavioral irregularities: frequently cited effects of lead include academic underperformance, delinquency, or even criminality, for example. How do toxic chemical exposure events—and the attendant medicalization of entire populations—both follow from and shed new light onto the other material inequalities of postindustrialism? The Flint water crisis challenges us to rethink the exigencies of chemical environments, as boundaries between symptom and society are contested and redrawn. I take Flint as a starting point for generating methodological and theoretical provocations to STS to develop new strategies and techniques for rewriting the “cultural biographies” of lead and other toxins to account for their semiotic, geographic, and temporal instabilities and mobility.

Author

• Elena Sobrino, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)