[CANCELED]
Organizers: University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Department of Geography and Environment, The Political Ecology Working Group
Description:
Air pollution now affects 92 percent of the global population and is responsible for one out of nine deaths, nearly two-thirds of which occur in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific. Political ecologies of air pollution examine how the noxious effects of air pollution are unevenly distributed across social categories such as race and class. However, much less is known about the social mechanisms through which air pollution as well as its risks and mitigation efforts are calculated. Based on ethnographic research in northern Thailand, we conceptualize air pollution as a (trans)boundary object that is flexibly interpreted through a range of historical and contemporary socialities that validate differential constructions of knowledge. In recent decades, broad shifts from subsistence farming to commercial agriculture and increased volumes of agricultural biomass burning have reportedly exacerbated the production of air pollution in the form of haze—an airborne mixture of pollutants that includes gasses, fine soot particles, and carbon dioxide. Once a quotidian phenomenon of relatively little concern, today seasonal air pollution is described as a haze crisis. While causal uncertainty exists surrounding the precise combination of the socio-ecological drivers of haze production, multiple narratives circulate throughout the region, in which blame is frequently placed on smallholder farmers who have recently entered into new market relations. Situated within broader regional agrarian transitions, we draw on mixed ethnographic, archival, and geospatial methods to examine the chronopolitics of seasonal air pollution and by what mechanisms such pollution comes to be constituted as a crisis. This presentation contributes to broader questions of how particulate matter matters differently within and between social groups as well as scholarship that accounts for the sociality of environmental change.
Speakers:
Olivier Évrard is a social anthropologist at the French Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD). Since 1994, he has worked in Northern Laos and northern Thailand and has published extensively on interethnic relationships, land-use systems, migration, and mythology. His current research examines the symbolic and material experience of air pollution in Chiang Mai. He is currently the IRD representative based at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.
Mary Mostafanezhad is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her work is broadly focused on development and socio-environmental change in Southeast Asia. Her current National Science Foundation-funded research examines the political ecology of seasonal air pollution in northern Thailand. She has also published widely on the political economy of tourism in Southeast Asia. She is the co-editor-in-chief of Tourism Geographies: An International Journal of Tourism Space, Place and Environment and a co-editor of the Critical Green Engagements Series of the University of Arizona Press.
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