Below, are some of the one-page info sheets each student created about particular toxicants found in Houston. They were created with multiple goals in mind:
- First, they would be shared with Houston’s One Breath Partnership for possible inclusion as part of the “Toxicity 101” section of their newsroom, which aims to inform Houstonians about toxicants of particular local concern.
- Second, they were an experiment in form, taking up questions about the visualization of toxicity and the regimes through which various forms of toxicity take shape as matters of fact and/or matters of concern.
- Third, they were an exercise in navigating the rather wicked tensions we’ve been engaging between the strategic optimism of calls for accountability, data, and transparency that are so important to the politics of environmental justice and the evident need to live with toxicity given the fact that, as we have come to say in class, “you can’t unscramble the egg.”
The assignments only requirements were that each info sheet address the following questions:
- What is it?
- How is it used?
- What are the signs of a spill/release/exposure?
- What to do in cases of spill/release/exposure? Include local resources.
- Other helpful resources or information can also be included.
Our discussions about the choices people made revealed a number of key themes:
- The desire to inform individuals while not making us responsible for the harms we experience.
- The false certainty and untroubled factishness that is projected in such a compressed form.
- The bracketing of relations that is required to present a single toxicant in isolation.
The results are a kind of visual toxic litany. Check it out for yourself:
