Chemical Exposures

Toxicity in the Anthropocene

Sahra Gibbon (Editor), Emilie Glazer (Editor), Lucy Sabin (Editor), Andrew Barry (Editor)

Exposure to toxic chemicals has become common place, yet the study of both chemicals and toxicity has tended to remain at the margins of the social sciences. This volume addresses the entangled landscape of toxic chemicals in the Anthropocene, drawing together research by anthropologists, geographers, artists, and scholars in science and technology studies. The contributors understand chemical pollution as not simply pervasive, but multiple, situated and unequal, profoundly relational and affective, traversing temporal and spatial scales as it continuously disrupts and reconfigures the relations between the geological and the human, the political and the material, and between the social and natural sciences and humanities. Chemical Exposures explores the accumulation of toxic substances, the multiple scales of exposure, and the diverse ways in which exposure can be both sensed and visualised.

List of figures
List of contributors
Foreword: M Murphy
Acknowledgements

1 Chemical exposures: accumulation, scale and sensing
Andrew Barry, Sahra Gibbon, Emilie Glazer, and Lucy Sabin

Part I: Accumulation

2 Chemical exposure beyond linear time: Towards a politics of intergenerational responsibility, justice and care Emilie Glazer, Andy Lautrup, and Sahra Gibbon

3 Endemic toxicities and the residues of extraction in Senegal
Noémi Tousignant

4 Living a Good (Enough) Life in a Permanently Polluted World: Grappling with Cumulative Toxicities, Un/Knowns, and Harm Reduction
Tait Mandler and Anita Hardon

Part II: Scale

5 Carbon Omissions: Toward a Toxic Stratigraphy of Northern Chile
Cristobal Bonelli, Damir Galaz-Mandakovic, Valentina Figueroa, Marina Weinberg, and Gabrielle Hecht

6 Universal Contamination: isotopes as material witnesses
Andrew Barry

7 Platinum Exposures: Extraction, exposability and catalysing otherwise
Kate Dawson, Anna Davidson, Bethany Fox

8 Beyond ‘sacrifice’: Suspending damage and situating exposure in Taranto, Italy
Raffaele Ippolito

Part III: Sensing

9 Scientists and pine trees in the midst of carbon, water and energy fluxes
Véra Ehrenstein

10 Toxic land, fertile land: Filming people-soil relationships in the French periphery
Mariana Rios Sandoval

11 Urban pesticides, environmental attitudes, and ‘everyday’ chemical exposure perception
Julia Shaw

12 Re-sensing: Aesthetic tensions of performing pollution in immersive art spaces
Lucy Sabin

Afterword: Elizabeth Roberts

DOI: 10.14324/111.9781806551576

Number of illustrations: 47

Publication date: 01 October 2026

EPUB ISBN: 9781806551583

Sahra Gibbon (Editor)

Sahra Gibbon is Professor of Medical Anthropology at UCL. She is co-lead for UCL Anthropocene and co-convenor of the UCL chemical exposures reading group. She is deeply committed to developing interdisciplinary approaches, including in her current work on Anthropocene Health, and also other projects focusing on Urban Mental Health and the social context and practices of Longitudinal birth cohort studies.

Emilie Glazer (Editor)

Emilie Werbner Glazer is an anthropologist whose research explores care, justice, and political violence in the changing ecologies of the climate crisis. Her PhD, completed at UCL and supported by the Wellcome Trust, traced the affective politics of water infrastructure in Palestine/Israel, with a focus on the city of Jerusalem. She has taught at King’s College London, UCL Anthropology and served as visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art.

Lucy Sabin (Editor)

Lucy Rose Sabin is a researcher and designer / artist trained in geography. Her work explores air, atmospheres, weather, care, reflexivity, art-science and environmental justice. She has experience in participatory arts, film production, podcasting, exhibition design, interface design, and front-end development. Lucy is currently a Research Fellow in the Digital Humanities Lab at the University of Sussex.

Andrew Barry (Editor)

Andrew Barry is Professor of Human Geography at UCL and co-lead of UCL Anthropocene. He is the author of Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (Athlone) and Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline (Wiley-Blackwell). Andrew originally studied Chemistry and Physics as an undergraduate, and much of his research has been concerned with the relations between the natural and social sciences.