Paper short abstract:

Ecological destruction operates within specific temporalities and spatialities. Therefore, knowledge production has to deal with rather undecidable and speculative effects, and is highly contested. I will discuss two ethnographic cases: microplastics in the ocean & toxic algal blooms in Chile.

Paper long abstract:

"Slow violence" (Nixon) enables to discuss pollution as a particular form of colonialism. However, it is difficult to represent slow violence because of the specific temporalities of ecological destruction. As Heather Davis (2015) writes, "the relationship between cause and effect often appears much later, or (…) in completely different organisms". Therefore, studies of contamination and long-term effects of ecological disturbance (linking environmental and health issues) have to deal with undecidable and speculative effects. For example, in the marine environment we are seeing the emergence of new entities and lifeforms like the plastisphere (habitats and aggregations of microplastics with microbial life) whose impact, potentials and/or risks for marine ecosystems are hard to evaluate.

Joe Masco explores "mutant ecologies" as linkages between nature, politics and futures. In my paper, I will contrast two examples of emergent mutant ecologies from my ethnographic research with rather different politics of scale:

1) The ubiquity of microplastics in the water is an increasing global problem. Nevertheless, the phenomenon is not easy to frame as environmental injustice because effects on ecosystems are rather speculative and though everyone seems to be concerned, no one seems to be responsible.

2) In 2016, a toxic algal bloom created a socio-environmental crisis on the island of Chiloé. Until now, knowledge production about the occurrence of red tide is highly contested between local actors and the Chilean government, at the same time addressing important issues like neglected local infrastructures, neoliberal exploitation of resources and labour, and the denial of indigenous knowledge.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses territorialisation as a form of "slow violence" in the Guinean gold mining context. It questions the use of state procedures by industrial gold mining companies - such as military interventions - to create sovereign territories within the State, at the expense of the population.

Paper long abstract:

This paper raises the issue of the state's official violence, and how it can insecure the local population in the Guinean gold mining context. Artisanal gold mining ​has been practiced for centuries in the region of Upper-Guinea. It historically relies on seasonal mobility between villages and temporary camps surrounding ​the ​mining fields. Since the 2000's and the gold price​ increases​, artisanal mining mobility has expanded and has been more and more rigorously controlled by state authorities at industrial mining companies' request. In 2015, the Guinean government has forbidden the implementation of temporary camps and conducted military interventions to make artisanal miners leave ​several​ areas exploited by industrial companies. My objective is to analyse the use of state procedures by industrial mining companies to understand "slow violence", and to question the ambiguous role of State in the more general process of territorialisation and land appropriation.

Building upon a 20 months ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2011 et 2017, I will firstly describe how the Guinean state militarily supports industrial mining companies to secure their perimeter and infrastructures, given them the sovereignty on their territories. Then, I will interrogate the ambiguous role of the state in the expelling of the local population (officially to secure them), while protecting mining infrastructures which seem to become a state within the state. Finally, I will analyse territorialisation as a form of "slow violence" led by the State, in a mining context where lands are highly damaged and people more and more precarious.

Paper short abstract:

The KwaDapha community lives inside the iSimangaliso Wetland Park. While its inhabitants are no longer forcefully removed from the park, restrictions on subsistence and denial of infrastructure can be seen as a form of slow violence that leaves them with little choice but to move away on their own.

Paper long abstract:

Ironically, not only the destruction of biodiversity, but also certain attempts of its protection may constitute environments of slow violence. Taking up an example from a South African national park, I argue that conservation regimes which are based on an understanding of nature and culture as a binary opposition tend to endanger the livelihoods of local people. Nixon (2011) highlights South Africa's difficult colonial and apartheid conservation histories which have created racialized ecologies that still pose a challenge to the conception of protected areas today. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork, this paper focuses on the community of KwaDapha which lives within the boundaries of the iSimangaliso Wetland Park. While, during apartheid times, many inhabitants of KwaDapha experienced forceful removal from their homes in the name of conservation, several families resisted eviction and remained inside the park. Still today, the presence of local people doesn't comply with common conservationists' imaginations of untouched nature and threatens the sale of this very imagination to paying tourists. Thus, conservation authorities severely restrict local forms of subsistence such as farming, fishing or hunting and hinder the development of any kind of infrastructure which fundamentally endangers local livelihoods. I argue that, while it is regarded as inappropriate to forcefully remove people from protected areas in post-apartheid South Africa, severe restrictions on subsistence and denial of infrastructure can be interpreted as a form of slow violence that leaves the community of KwaDapha little choice but to move out of the park on their own.

Paper short abstract:

NGO work provisioning sustainable futures through agriculture and tree planting in the boundary of the Sahara desert, face what appears to be the inevitable creep of the Sahara northwards occasioning existential questions.

Paper long abstract:

NGO work aimed at provisioning sustainable futures in the boundary of the Sahara desert, although rarely stated, face what appears to be the inevitable creep of the Sahara northwards edging into the more temperate 'Mediterranean clime'. The paper delves into the how the enormity of the scales involved in this process of gradual erosion can seem to betray the phenomenological—lived and sensed world in which their is hope and options —if development aid is secured, poverty alleviation projects put into place and administered with care. I reflect on these how the 'mortal grind' of these competing temporalities as they play out in a massive tree planting operation being rolled out in this precarious ecology and the existential questions such efforts give rise to.

Paper short abstract:

Based on research in a Kenyan public hospital, this paper discusses how the concept of "slow violence" might relate to local aetiologies of suffering, abandonment and responsibility as they emerge in the hospital and in critiques on social media about the state´s indifference to the public´s health.

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic research in a Kenyan public hospital, this paper discusses how the concept of "slow violence" might relate to local aetiologies of suffering, abandonment and responsibility as they emerge on the hospital wards and in critiques on social media about the state´s indifference to the public´s health amidst the expansion of lucrative medical markets. Despite the influx of global health funds into Kenya, deteriorating national health infrastructures act together with out-of-pocket payments to undermine treatment trajectories, and patients experience an uneven environment of both care and neglect. This paper attends to moments or events of critique, when the status quo is confronted, and endurance of these conditions turns into indignation, anger and refusal.

Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among a medical outreach team who cares for poor patients with multiple chronic diseases, I explore the slow violence of austerity in Spain as it plays out and is experienced by patients, and the way it is addressed by health professionals and social workers.

Paper long abstract:

Post-crisis austerity is weighing on the lives and health of people in Southern Europe. In Spain, unemployment and ever more precarious labour conditions, combined with reduced welfare services, a lack of affordable housing, and rising co-payments in healthcare bear on peoples' mental and physical health. Survival rather than a good life has become a daily fact for the poor and chronically ill, some of whom qualify their existences as a "life which is no life". Based on ethnographic fieldwork among a medical outreach team who cares for poor patients with multiple chronic diseases, I explore the slow violence of austerity as it plays out and is experienced by the team's patients, and the way it is addressed by health professionals and social workers. I argue that doctors, social workers and nurses sustain survival within ever more uncertain regimes of aid, opaque bureaucratic requirements and medical and social institutions fashioned by demands for saving. I thereby intend to show that austerity policies, in the domain of health and social care, not only kill, as epidemiological studies have demonstrated, but also enclose the poor and chronically ill in a life which is no life for an undetermined time. Chronically ill patients and their families struggle to survive, while longing for and demanding a more decent life, and sometimes even death.