CFP: Making Environmental Harm Manifest

Image from “Maternal Exposure to Particulate Air Pollution and Engineered Nanoparticles: Reproductive and Developmental Effects” By Petra Jackson, Ulla Vogel, Håkan Wallin and Karin Sørig Hougaard 2011.

4S Conference
October 9 – 12, 2013
San Diego, California

Some of the challenges of twenty-first century pollutants are 1) their imperceptibility to dominant scientific formations, 2) their ability to do harm in trace quantities, 3) the subtle forms of intergenerational harm they can produce, and 4) the ubiquity of exposure throughout everyday spaces across socio, cultural and physiological boundaries. We seek papers on how pollutants and/or environmental harm are being or have been made manifest–available to view, understanding, or apprehension–via science, design, art, community organizations or DIY methods. Forms of intervention, and even environmental justice, are often premised on the ability to define pollution, where definition refers to the distillation of the essential nature of a thing via science, but also to the action of making definite, the condition of being made into a substantive form or outline, and the capacity to render something distinct to the senses.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

- methods and struggles to define pollution, environment, contamination, etc
- the process for recognizing brown-fields, superfund sites, or other officially contaminated spaces
- the stakes of definition work in environmental health and justice
- technologies and methodologies for monitoring phenomena such as indoor air quality, bodily contamination, endocrine disruptors in water, etc
- the role of biomonitoring in private and public health realms
- popular epidemiology and citizen science research
- the relationships between technologies of detection and the norms, standards, or deviations they produce

To investigate material practices of making environmental harms manifest, this panel will be paired with a workshop entitled: Experiments Monitoring the Everyday: Art, Design, and DIY Methods for Environmental Health Research in STS.

Please send a 250 word abstract and CV to co-organizers Sara Wylie s.wylie@neu.edu and Max Liboiron max.liboiron@nyu.edu by March 1, 2013. Please put “4S panel” in the subject heading. We will then submit the panel to 4S for consideration.