Visualizing Occupational Harm: A Methodological Reflection on Counter-Mapping with Nail Technicians

• In Event: Toxic Entanglements: acting on slow, invisible, and emerging realities - IV: Feminist/Queer Approach to Toxic

Abstract

The nail salon is a site of occupational harm. Nail technicians report a multitude of health issues and concerns rooted in their exposure to workplace toxicants, unerganomic design, and the conditions of precarious work. In the Greater Toronto Area, nail technicians tend to be newcomer and immigrant-settler women of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean descent. Their work conditions reflect the racialized-gendered division of labour in which precarious, low- wage, and undervalued labour, including service and care work, is offloaded to racialized and newcomer women. Yet the nail salon remains an underacknowledged site of occupational/toxic violence. As a workplace, the nail salon is a site of slow violence where harm is incrimental and, as a result, “out of site” (Nixon, 2011). However, Davies (2019) asks: “Out of site to whom”? – a reflection on the erasure of community- and worker-based situated and embodied knowledges. “Visualizing Occupational Harm: A Methodological Reflection on Counter-Mapping with Nail Technicians” reflects on these themes via a discussion of occupational health mapping – a worker-led methodological tool that visualizes corporeal manifestations of workplace harm.
From August 2019 – February 2020, a series of occupational health mapping workshops were held with 37 Toronto-based nail technicians. The worker-participants produced visualizations of the corporeal implications of their exposure to workplace hazards, including toxicants. As a method, occupational health mapping contests top-down approaches that construct workers’ bodies as research “subjects,” such as in biomonitoring. The method is rooted in and demonstrates that workers are the experts of their bodies and work environments.

Author

• Reena Shadaan