Project
Embodied Ecologies
Among the existential threats that require lifestyle and policy changes for humans to live within the boundaries of planetary sustainability, one issue remains both under-studied and under-regulated: our growing use of synthetic chemicals that accumulate in our bodies, leading to a range of serious health problems. There is a grim, emerging consensus that the problem is beyond our control, with the unknown cumulative effects of exposures rendering the establishing of causal relationships between exposures and health effects impossible.
Embodied Ecologies is led by Anita Hardon (KTI/SSG), who was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant in 2022. Working across scales (individual, community, city, nation) and disciplines (anthropology of the body, urban political ecology, experimental governance), Embodied Ecologies is set in two Western European and two Southeast Asian cities that have adopted green policies but differ starkly in their regulatory environments.
By focusing on what ordinary people and city planners do to avoid or reduce chemical exposures and the concerns that inform these practices, we gain insight into the structural constraints that enable and/or constrain their ability to protect themselves—insights that will inform new harm reduction strategies that present pathways to transformative change.
Ethnographic fieldwork conducted by 30 researchers during the first exploratory phase of the project revealed that soil health is a recurrent concern among our informants. This includes groups of women in the Philippines who organize themselves to learn how to improve soil health in their home gardens as well as in their community gardens that they set up during lockdown to secure food for their families and communities.
Terre Toxique, Terre Fertile
Soil toxicity and health became a visible concern within citizens in Paris, as captured in Terre Toxique, Terre Fertile (Toxic Land, Fertile Land), a documentary made by postdoc Mariana Rios. Her documentary follows the quest of neighbors and organizations in the French suburbs to turn a brownfield back into fertile land. The film gives depth and texture to soil, something often absent from the urban imagination, through the stories, childhood memories, sensory and material practices of those directly engaged with this plot of land.
(Rios Sandoval, Mariana dir. 2022. Terre Toxique, Terre Fertile/Toxic Land, Fertile Land)