NEPS
5029

Toxicity, Ecology & Health: Restoring the Body-Territory

Schools of Public Engagement: Milano

Non-Liberal Arts
Undergraduate Course
Graduate Course
Degree Students
Toxicity, Ecology & Health
Spring 2025
Taught By: Abigail Perez Aguilera
Section: A

CRN: 14791

Credits: 3

How do we describe a healthy environment? How does the presence of toxicity in communities change the dynamics of conviviality, life expectancy as well as the landscape? How do different regions around the world experience, overcome and sometimes completely change due to the presence of unhealthy environments, including toxic ones? How is the toxification of territories and environments embodied in bodies and communities of humans and other-than-humans? How do communities and other actors work to restore the interconnected health of territories, environments and bodies? These questions among others will be explored in this course relying on texts and resources that center analyses of toxicity, waste, risk assessment and risk management, health, community based activism, citizen science, gender and queer studies, posthumanism, critical studies of science and technology, critiques of racial capitalism, decolonization and depatriarchalization of knowledge, among others. This course creates a space to critically examine how toxicity has been interpreted, contested and addressed (or not addressed) within science, knowledge production, the production and politics of ‘expertise’, policy, governance, and community organizing. We will center environmental-health justice, subjugated knowledges, and community and global health approaches that conceive of body and territory as one. We will examine toxicity, waste and health both in the broad context of knowledge and governance, as well as through applied case examinations that connect toxicity, ecology and health in relation to contested interpretations, power/knowledge relations and responses from different actors, including scientists and scholars, the science-policy interface, policy makers, civil society and social movement actors, artists, and people from different communities affected by toxic environments. We will address matters of toxic embodiment through a territorial approach such as in examples of carcinogens, waste management and processing, toxified industrial and extractive sites and territories, among others. By taking an integrated territorial-community approach that ties health of body and ecology, we situate the critical engagement with toxicity in relation to broader projects of monumental modernity, developmentalism, racial capitalism and the decolonization of health.

College: Schools of Public Engagement (NS)

Department: Milano (MIL)

Campus: New York City (GV)

Course Format: Seminar (R)

Modality: In-Person

Max Enrollment: 15

Repeat Limit: N/A

Add/Drop Deadline: February 3, 2025 (Monday)

Online Withdrawal Deadline: April 15, 2025 (Tuesday)

Seats Available: No

Status: Closed*

* Status information is updated every few minutes. The status of this course may have changed since the last update. Open seats may have restrictions that will prevent some students from registering. Updated: 8:00pm EST 12/11/2024

Meeting Info:
Days: Monday
Times: 6:00pm - 7:50pm
Building: Johnson/Kaplan 66 West 12th
Room: 602
Date Range: 1/20/2025 - 5/14/2025