240512 SE MM3 Toxicity, chemosociality and alterlife (2023W)

This course explores questions of technologically-induced ecological ruination and health related issues by engaging critically with many toxic materials, imaginaries, and futurities. In so doing, the course aims to examine in which multiple ways many human and more-than-human beings have experienced toxicity and health deteriorated existences in the Anthropocene. The anthropological texts taken into account during the course analyse various perspectives on alternative worlds that could follow from environmental pollution, anthropogenic climate change, radiological contamination, species extinction, the proposed Anthropocene epoch, as well as the dreary futures they call us to envisage. In addition, the course shows how disciplines such as Socio-Cultural Anthropology and Science & Technology can widen our repertoire of modalities for engaging with Anthropocene today and tomorrow as well as how we can conceive of other term to define and frame present and future intertwinements among the environment, humans and more-than-human beings. The texts analyzed during the class will engage critically with socially, historically and politically loaded word such Anthropocene and try to outline post- and de-colonial alternative metaphors and terms to describe our epoch.
The goal of this course is therefore to expand students’ capacities to reckon with near and deep futures during a historical moment of ecological turmoil, as well as to support a sustained reflection on the art of living wisely on a damaged planet. Therefore, students will take toxicity in all its contradictions as both an object and an analytic that helps us ask new questions and gain new perspectives on the materialities of social difference, the politics of evidence, the nature of health, and the nature of nature. The papers in the course will trace how toxicity connects humans to histories, to processes and to other positioned otherwises. In so doing, the topics taken into account will explore how alternative notions and metaphors for describe the Anthropocene and toxicity rely on and unsettle familiar geographies of colonialism and state sovereignty. In this regard, students will engage with various questions and issues. Therefore, they will be able to: (1) critically evaluate debates about environmental justice in various world settings and contexts; (2) understand key features and problems of toxicity in both the Global South and North; (3) relate health environmental toxicity and pollution with health issues and socio-economic and political vulnerability; comprehend the multiple ways that the production of scientific/biomedical expertise entails the management of race, gender, disability, class and other categories of social difference and how such expertise are driven by wider socio-political and economic interests. Finally, students will be able to look at the politics of scientific evidence and the way authoritative knowledge is tied to various forms of discursive practices.