Toxic Goodness: Harmful Legacies, Hopeful Futures – II

Abstract

How do you cultivate good practices, relationships, and things in an environment of toxicants, toxic politics, and toxic relationalities? How do toxic production systems--based on extractivism, colonialism, and plantation capitalism--foment new forms of sustainability that cannot be excised from their deadly foundations? This open call examines urgent tensions between toxic legacies and hopeful futures when it comes to so-called renewable energies, green/blue/bio-economies, waste management systems, and sustainable agriculture/aquaculture. Such hopeful alternatives to unsustainable production systems hold within them the possibility of working towards a “Greater Good,” however, “goodness” is largely built on toxic colonial and capitalist foundations that are rendered invisible through sustainability discourse. In other words, in making sustainable things or practices, toxicities in many forms are in fact often sustained. This panel will therefore investigate the ways scientists, investors, and producers in the agricultural, aquacultural, and waste sectors build on toxic legacies as they seek to render generative material processes--such as photosynthesis, bioremediation, and fermentation--into sustainable tools. We encourage papers that empirically illuminate how social systems and material processes together shore up, generate, and maintain toxicity. Such investigations will open space to question whether and how good relations could be cultivated out of toxic relationships without assuming toxicity can be entirely expunged. The overall aim of this open panel is thus to critically address how sustainable processes depend on toxic production systems, as a first step towards activating better ways of living amid toxicity.

Chair

• Duygu Kasdogan, İzmir Katip Çelebi University

Discussant

• Timothy Neale, Deakin University

Individual Presentations

• Lesser Flamingo Life and Death: Nourishing Toxicity, ‘Generous’ Mines and Metabolic Transitions in Kimberley, South Africa - Carina Truyts, Sol Plaatje University

• An Extractive Science? Complicated Industries and Crude Natures - Zsuzsanna Dominika Ihar, University of Sydney

• Beyond Remediation—Mourning as a New Worlding Practice - Caroline Ektander, Bauhaus Universität Weimar

• Caring For and Living With Extractive Legacies in Northern Canada - Caitlynn Beckett, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Department of

• Rethinking Plastic Realities: A Call for a Well-being Approach to Understanding Human-plastic Entanglements - Jessica Vandenberg, University of Washington; marlena skrobe; Jill Fallman, University of Washington; Karin Otsuka, University of Washington; Ivy Serwaa Gyimah Akuoko, University of Cape Coast; Suzy An, University of Washington

Session Organizers

• Duygu Kasdogan, İzmir Katip Çelebi University

• Jessica Caporusso, York University

• Katie Ulrich, Rice University