This report summarizes the closing workshop of the DFG Emmy-Noether research group “Hazardous Travels” hosted by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. The conference kicked off with the annual RCC Tandem Lecture, which was followed by a two-day workshop on narrating, celebrating, and defying hazardous hope in environments of the Global South and Global North that faced toxic pollution.

The curator ANTONIA ALAMPI (Berlin) and the historian KATE BROWN (Boston) gave insights into their research during the public keynote event that was organized in the form of an interdisciplinary tandem lecture1 followed by a discussion with the audience. Brown vividly retraced the interconnections of ecosystems by referring to the topic of radioactivity. According to her investigations, hazardous hope can be discovered in the journey of groceries from contaminated soils to our breakfast table, allegorizing a first step towards restoration. The complex routes of toxicity and its uneven distribution across borders were also the central topic of Alampi's presentation. Both talks outlined the various perspectives one can take upon toxicity (i.e. artistic, political) and showed the integrative role exhibitions can play in distributing research to the broader public and providing opportunities to engage with the topic of toxicity beyond the ivory tower of academia.

Attended by international scholars, paper presentations and discussions of the non-public workshop centered on practices of resistance and resilience, environmental movements and activism as well as dangers of adopting hopeful narratives. The cases discussed affected landscapes of injustice such as post-industrial assemblages in Wallonia (Belgium), the e-waste dumpsite in Agbogbloshie (Ghana), degraded farmland of Delta State (Nigeria), or radioactively contaminated areas around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (Ukraine). Other papers investigated the visual narration of toxicity, the role of humor in the field of ecological destruction, or the treatment of toxic narratives in contemporary literature and political frameworks. The covered time span ranged from the 17th century when British settlers colonialized the Caribbean island Antigua heralding an epoch of resource exploitation to today, when ethnic minorities like the Dara’ang currently living in northern Thailand face accumulations of agricultural pesticide damage. The geographic scope of the presented works ranged from Northern (Sweden), Middle (Belgium) and Eastern Europe (Ukraine), North (USA, Antigua and Barbuda) and South America (Brazil, Ecuador) to Africa (Nigeria, Ghana) and Asia (Russia, Thailand).

Some of the papers aimed at uncovering stories of hope: DANIELE VALISENA (Stockholm) considered toxicity as the main revealer of the long-lasting heritage of the metabolism of coal in Wallonia, while TREASA DE LOUGHRY (Dublin) investigated the role of techno-bricoleurs – citizens (in-)directly affected by prevailing postcolonial structural asymmetries. CHARLOTTE GOUDGE (Waltham) complemented these views by linking postcolonial exploitation and environmental racism to colonial environmental violence and its long-reaching implications for the environment and communities. The implications of these practices became even more lively when NATASCHA DE VASCONCELLOS OTOYA (Washington D.C.) introduced the case of João de Deus de Souza, one of many Brazilians who lived and worked in landscapes toxified by the oil industry in the 20th century, as a historical case for Black Lives Matter.

Stepping away from places and stories where hopeful paradigms are difficult to notice, other participants focused on detecting hopescapes in places that seem to be lost at first glance. However, HANNAH KLAUBERT (Stockholm/Giessen), TATJANA KASPERSKI (Barcelona), and ANNA STORM (Linköping) managed to install (hazardous) hope by narrating futurity of toxic, nuclear waste bodies. The role of the “Babushkas of Chernobyl” and the ways of treating radioactive residue as an anthropogenic wound rather than something that seemingly disappears were contemplated as wellsprings for hope. Shifting perspectives away from nuclear to household garbage and industrial toxins dumped in Boston Harbor and the Port of Tacoma, PAVLA ŠIMKOVÁ (Munich) and SARA JACOBS (Vancouver) examined new ways of treating the past legacies. While the transformation of Boston Harbor from wasteland to urban playground can be considered as a trash-to-triumph story aiming at forgetting the past turpitudes, the remediation projects installed at the Port of Tacoma failed to establish socioecological resiliency.

Artistic ways of celebrating hope were present in the work of AMELIA FISKE (Munich) and JONAS FISCHER (Kiel). In their graphic novel “Toxic”, which is based on ethnographic research regarding oil contamination in the Ecuadorian Amazon, they investigated the process of bringing anthropological findings to life and making them accessible to the broader public. How to engage the general society was also part of NIKOLAI SKIVEREN’s (Aarhus) research on humor and ecomedia. His discussion of Jemery Konner’s mockumentary “The Majestic Plastic Bag” (2010) and Satyakam Dutta’s satirical short “Finding Beauty in Garbage” (2019) both evoked a smile on the faces of the participants and demonstrated how the contemporary environmental discourse can move away from guilt, shame, and prescriptiveness. Resistance to the currently adopted ways of living and thinking have likewise been observed by HENRIETTA ESHALOMI (Ibadan) and FEYISITAN IJIMAKINWA (Ibadan) in the Niger Delta, a landscape that has been and still is severely environmentally degraded, suffering additionally from corruption and mismanagement. Despite ages of poverty, repressions, and deceit, the self-organization of militants and victims managed to put some pressure on the federal Nigerian government and on oil multinationals to enhance socioeconomic productivity and restore environmental justice. Activists operating in global networks were also a reason to celebrate hope in the asbestos story, introduced by ARTHUR ROSE (Bristol). He took the case of asbestos that has been a topic of research and a motif of literature for several decades, as a role model for successful activism and solidarity towards victims and deteriorated landscapes.

Building upon the topic of global activism, the workshop was complemented with presentations and discussions on how to live with human induced toxicity. SARAH EHLERS (Munich) described the role of different publics in debating pesticide use, also taking into account narratives of North-South cooperation and activist movements during the 1980s. HUIYING NG (Munich) added to this discourse insights on how to structure narrative environments so that prevalent harm is neither perpetuated nor new harm is inflicted. She explored this dialectic by focusing on the Dara’an Development Project in northern Thailand which aimed at building up infrastructure in an area polluted by agricultural pesticides and occupied by an ethnic minority group facing drug addiction and eviction. These findings were again augmented by taking on an artistic view on phytoremediation, a process of both detoxifying and further disrupting land and eco-systems. SIOBHAN ANGUS (New Haven) used Susanne Kriemann’s photographic series “Pechblende” as an example for demonstrating slow hope in the mining industry of the former German Democratic Republic: this kind of artistic practice highlighted both the ongoing socio-ecological costs of extractivism, mirrored in a dark and toxic aesthetic but also called a new future into being by entangling the pristine binary of the natural world.

The final discussion among the workshop participants moderated by SIMONE M. MÜLLER (Munich) centered around the questions on defining hazardous hope as well as on scrutinizing its underlying assumptions. According to the researchers, hope in general could be defined as a normative, prescriptive category dependent on experience and expectations while also encompassing a vision of motivating change. Hazardous hope however is closely related to and determined by how we as humans expose ourselves to hope while being surrounded by certain political structures. In this context, (hazardous) hope can be found through learning from history, adapting to changing circumstances, and by approaching it via visual means or new research methods, such as walking, or considering more-than-humans. The closing question asking provocatively “What for?” revealed a manifold, multifaceted atmospheric picture, as diverse as the workshop presentations. (Hazardous) hope might be used to rewrite environmental history and keep our own sanity when researching toxins and toxicants. It can also enable environmental change, instilling the perpetual volition of moving forward.

Conference overview:

Public Keynote

Antonia Alampi (Spore Initiative, Berlin) and Kate Brown (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston): How to Live with Toxicity? An Interdisciplinary Conversation

Panel 1 and 2: Uncovering Hope

Daniele Valisena (KTH – Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm): Dead Mines, Ruderal Lives, and More-Than-Human Ecologies. Toxicity and Post-Industrial Assemblages in Wallonia, Belgium

Treasa De Loughry (University College Dublin): Re-Infrastructure the Future. E-Waste and African Digital Imaginaries

Charlotte Goudge (Brandeis University, Waltham): Landscapes of Injustice. Caribbean Environmental Violence and Manufacture in the Colonial Past

Natascha de Vasconcellos Otoya (Georgetown University, Washington D.C.): Historical Black Lives Matter

Panel 3 and 4: Hopescapes

Hannah Klaubert (Stockholm University / Justus-Liebig-University Giessen): Ecological Spinsters in Contaminated Environments. Narrating Futurity in Stories about the Babushkas of Chernobyl

Tatjana Kasperski (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona) and Anna Storm (Linköping University): Eternal Care. Nuclear Waste as Toxic Legacy and Future Fantasy

Pavla Šimková (Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich): From Trash to Triumph? The “Redemption” of Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor

Sara Jacobs (University of British Columbia, Vancouver): Unsettling Sedimentation. Abolition and Care at the Port of Tacoma, Washington

Panel 5 and 6: Celebrating Hope

Amelia Fiske (Technische Universität Munich) and Jonas Fischer (Muthesius
Academy Kiel): Exploring the Visual Narration of Toxicity. The Challenges and Potentials of Turning Ethnography into Graphic Novel

Nicolai Skiveren (Aarhus University): Humor and Ecomedia. Witty Anthropomorphism and Self-reflexive Ecocriticism

Henrietta Eshalomi and Feyisitan Ijimakinwa (University of Ibadan): The Anxiety of Hope. Disappointment, Despair and Memory of Environmental Realities in Delta State, South South Nigeria

Arthur Rose (University of Bristol): Old Hazards, New Hopes. Asbestos in Modern and Contemporary Literature

Panel 7 and 8: Living with Toxicity

Sarah Ehlers (Deutsches Museum Munich): “Our Common Future.” Representations of North-South Relations in the Debate on Hazardous Pesticides during the 1980s

Huiying Ng (Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich): Restoration amidst/beyond Toxicity. Narrative Environments as Spatial and Ethnographic Acts

Siobhan Angus (Yale University, New Haven): (Phyto) Remediation. Slow Hope in Susanne Kriemann’s “Pechblende”

Concluding Comments and Final Discussion

Note:
1https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8RYkxhOGZk&t=899s899s