Dayna Nadine Scott

‘We Are the Monitors Now’ Experiential Knowledge, Transcorporeality and Environmental Justice

Residents of pollution hotspots often take on projects in ‘citizen science’, or popularepidemiology, in an effort to marshal the data that can prove their experience of the pollution to the relevant authorities. Sometimes these tactics, such as pollution logs or bucket brigades, take advantage of residents’ spatially ordered and finely honed experiential and sensory knowledge of the places they inhabit. But putting that knowledge into conversation with law requires them to mobilize a new, ‘foreign’ set of tools, primarily oriented to the observation, measurement and sampling of pollution according to conventional scientific standards. Here, I employ qualitative empirical methods in two case studies of communities ‘downwind’ of Canada’s contested tar sands region to demonstrate that the knowledge that is crucial to these citizen science strategies is not only local, situated and experiential in origin but also collectively generated and held. I draw on the notion of transcorporeality, emanating from feminist theory of the body, to demonstrate that the knowledge offered to law through these efforts often represents a fluid merger of experiential and conventional ways of knowing, posing a productive challenge to the strictly positive notions of science and evidence dominant in legal proceedings.

Body Polluted: Questions of Scale, Gender and Remedy

This paper offers a critique of tort remedies grounded in feminist theory of the body. It demonstrates how tort law is invested in a notion of an individuated legal subject, which fails to capture the critical interconnectedness of bodies in a social, political, historical, and colonial context. Taking the ‘injury’ of endocrine disruption in a Canadian aboriginal community as an example of a contemporary pollution harm, the analysis considers various torts on a conceptual level, and what they might offer the Aamjiwnaang First Nation in the way of remedies. In each case, what the tort can do depends on how the injury, and the scale at which the entity taken to have suffered the injury, is conceived.

‘Wannabe Toxic-Free?’ From Precautionary Consumption to Corporeal Citizenship

ABSTRACT Ecological citizens are increasingly encouraged to adopt ‘precautionary consumption’ – a set of practices aimed at shielding them from the potential health harms of exposures to everyday toxics. The utility and the effects of precautionary consumption in relation to common chemical exposures are investigated. Precautionary consumption is not only of questionable utility, but is fundamentally misguided as an approach for inspiring antitoxics organizing. The failure of this approach is in part due to its assumption of a naturally bounded, autonomous individual who is able to maintain an impermeable boundary between herself and the environment. Drawing on the work of material feminist theorists, it is argued that Gabrielson and Parady’s notion of corporeal citizenship, an approach that places bodies into a complex web of material, ecological relations entangled with the social, offers several strategic advantages for framing resistance strategies.

Wannabe Toxic-Free? From Precautionary Consumption to Corporeal Citizenship

Ecological citizens are increasingly encouraged to adopt ‘precautionary consumption’ – a set of practices aimed at shielding them from the potential health harms of exposures to everyday toxics. The utility and the effects of precautionary consumption in relation to common chemical exposures are investigated. Precautionary consumption is not only of questionable utility, but is fundamentally misguided as an approach for inspiring antitoxics organizing. The failure of this approach is in part due to its assumption of a naturally bounded, autonomous individual who is able to maintain an impermeable boundary between herself and the environment. Drawing on the work of material feminist theorists, it is argued that Gabrielson and Parady’s notion of corporeal citizenship, an approach that places bodies into a complex web of material, ecological relations entangled with the social, offers several strategic advantages for framing resistance strategies.