Rosie Hancock  0:06  
Hi, I'm Rosie Hancock in Sydney, Australia,

Alexis Hieu Truong  0:10  
And I'm Alexis Hieu Truong in Gatineau/Ottawa, Canada, and this is Uncommon Sense from the Sociological Review Foundation. It's where we take as our theme something that's become a bit of a mainstream term or something in everyday use. Like, recently, we talked about community, burnout and – last season – we talked about things like anxiety or spirituality. And we sit down with a friendly expert guest who can help us to see it differently, more critically, more sociologically.

Rosie Hancock  0:39 
Today, our theme is a word that I associate with a Britney Spears track. I guess I'm kind of giving away my age with that, but our theme this month is Toxic. You might have heard it used in recent talk about masculinity, or perhaps the politics of Donald Trump, but it could also take us to conversations about consumption, waste, governance and environmental harm.

Alexis Hieu Truong  1:02 
And perhaps unsurprisingly, it's that latter area that we're talking around today with our guest Alice Mah, who is Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow and the author of “Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation”, as well as “Plastic Unlimited: How Corporations Are Fueling the Ecological Crisis And What We Can Do About It”, among other works. She'll be delivering the Annual Lecture at the Sociological Review Undisciplining II conference in Salford, UK on September 11 2024. Yeah, but that's in the future at the time of this recording, but it'll be in the past when you're listening to this.

Rosie Hancock  1:47 
Hopefully, today, we're going to be talking about everything from toxic expertise to waste colonialism, as well as stopping to dwell for a while on that increasingly controversial word: hope. And I should say these are all things I'm especially interested in, as my work looks at religion and environmental activism, so I'm really looking forward to getting going today. Alice, welcome to Uncommon Sense.

Alice Mah  2:11  
Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Rosie Hancock  2:16  
Alice, what do you think about toxicity in, just in your everyday life?

Alice Mah  2:21 
Well, I come at toxicity from a more – I guess – material sense, so less about the toxic culture side and more about pollution. Yeah, I've been studying toxic pollution for the better part of my career, and especially over the past 10 years, and through studying toxicity you start to see it everywhere. And I think a lot of – I mean – it really is, I should say, very unequal. So some people are much, much more exposed to the sharper side of toxic pollution, where it is acutely harmful to their health and wellbeing and ecosystems. In my own life, I see it in the carpets and the floorboards and household products. Living now in Glasgow – moving, having recently moved house – it is palpably harmful actually in a lot of these household products, as a lot of research is coming out to show, for example, in the Forever Chemicals we find everywhere. It's increasingly in the air we breathe in major cities and rural areas, and this is again unequal but it's also a trans-boundary issue where it happens all around the world, rising rates of asthma and respiratory illnesses. It's in land and water systems. Pretty much everywhere you look, you're going to find toxicity, and the key challenge is thinking about how you manage the elements of harm in the environment in your everyday life without getting overly paranoid, because being worried about it can also increase your anxiety about it. So yeah, it's there everywhere, but it's a bigger problem for some people rather than others.

Alexis Hieu Truong  4:18 
So, Alice talking about the toxicity in the everyday life, right. If I understand it, you've taught environmental sociology, like, what does that actually involve? Like, where I teach, my impression is that this subject is becoming more and more popular with students. Do you have any sense of why this might be the case and why students are signing up to such a module, whether they're surprised by what they find it entails or not?

Alice Mah  4:45 
Yeah, so I've been teaching environmental sociology for a few years now. I introduced a course in my university back in 2021 after the – you know – opening up after the pandemic. And yeah, there was a huge appetite among students for environmental sociology. I mean, I think every country is different in terms of the environmental sociological traditions. Canada, Britain and Australia, where we're all speaking from, have very different traditions to where it is practiced elsewhere as a sub discipline of sociology, which started in the – you know – the 70s, and has its own sort of evolution. It's been, you know, maybe stronger in some areas rather than other areas, and in Britain I would say it's been a relatively niche – kind of – subfield in comparison to other areas. But I would say that since the widespread attention to the climate emergency in 2019 that sort of percolated across a lot of media, and rising attention to plastic waste as well, just sort of increasing environmental awareness more broadly, as well as environmental reporting, has led to an appetite among students to understand that. And also to sociologists who wouldn't necessarily see themselves as environmentalists, starting to realise that actually in order to study society, you have to study the relationship between society and the environment in which society is interdependent with.

Alexis Hieu Truong  6:23 
So what have sociologists – or maybe, like a sociological approach – brought to the reflection? What can it tell us about the environment?

Alice Mah  6:33  
I mean, there are many different definitions of environmental sociology. I think the core insight is the understanding that power and social inequality play a very strong role in shaping human and what you might call non-human, or more than human, or environmental interactions. So looking at that interaction between the social and the ecological, and I think that is missing from approaches that see the environment as entirely technical, like within the realms of science or apolitical. So I think that attention to how, for example, access to environmental resources is inherently bound up with social inequalities and issues of power.

Rosie Hancock  7:26 
I'm wondering, Alice, you said that environmental sociology was sort of a niche, you know, sub discipline, right? Do you think there's a problem with that, as in, you know, if it's seen as being separate to so called mainstream sociology, you know, could keeping it separate imply that the environment – or, you know, so called nature – is distinct from us and from us humans, which are the proper topic for sociology? You know, humans are the proper topic. And you know, environmental sociologists are over there doing their own little niche thing, you know. So, so is the discipline maybe a bit stuck when it comes to thinking beyond human centric ways of seeing?

Alice Mah  8:06 
I mean, interestingly, the emergence of the discipline in the 70s – I mean, in primarily, in the US – was this idea precisely that you cannot separate societies from the environment, and that these human and non-human worlds are interdependent. And so very much a critique of the mainstream idea of sociology that, you know, somehow there's this idea of human exceptionalism. And so I think there was an optimism early in environmental sociology that, somehow, all of sociology would wake up to this reality, but that, that didn't happen. You know, the different versions of environmental sociology have developed – some, you know, following quite, I don't know, classical sociological views, like, for example, Marxist inspired environmental sociology. Yeah, I would say now, actually, interestingly, I think a lot of the attention to the more than human and the kind of very different ways of thinking about ecology is happening in spaces other than sociology, like other than environmental sociology as well. Philosophy, anthropology, geography, and it has a much longer history as well in terms of indigenous views of ecology and ecofeminism. So, sociology as a whole has been quite slow to embrace those ideas, and I think there's still a tension in the discipline because the primary object of study – if you want to call it that – is society. And so it's difficult sometimes to convince sociologists that the environment is, in fact, part of themselves and it's inseparable. That insight is difficult to make every, all sociologists get on board with.

Rosie Hancock  10:02  
You mentioned more than human in there, and I was wondering if you could just explain what that means?

Alice Mah  10:09  
Well, I mean, it's not a term that I as such use. It is a term that a lot of scholars use. It's kind of an awkward thing, it's kind of like talking about a category of race or gender, and then saying the non aspect of that, it has an othering quality. So that's why I think some people, instead of saying human and non-human, non-human makes the non sound like it's somehow not as good as the human, so then they say more than human to sort of compensate for that. But I think the insights there are effectively a relational understanding of the world, which does have a long history in many different cultures, including indigenous and other – I guess – traditional views of relationships with the land and with people and ecosystems. And it's, it's a complicated idea to try to unpick and I think, in a way, to understand it, it isn't actually an academic point to understand. It's actually a very deep, almost spiritual insight that we humans are not separate from – you know – the mountains that sustain us, the rivers that sustain us, the animals that we eat, the air that we breathe, and all the things that we do in in our lives, our actions are not separable from what we put out there, in a way, so that it's a very – I guess – enmeshed and entangled system of relations, and it's an illusion to imagine that we as humans have some sort of dominance over that set of relations.

Alexis Hieu Truong  11:52 
Expanding on this – kind of, like – these various forms of knowledge that we develop about the environment and about toxicity, we're going to centre on your thinking expressed in and around the writing of two recent books, right? So “Plastic Unlimited” and “Petrochemical Planet", and we'll move kind of fluidly between the two, rather than confining you to talking about like one specific work. But am I right that both of them kind of draw on a project called Toxic Expertise, and could you tell us what that was and what it involved?

Alice Mah  12:25  
Both drew inspiration, certainly, from the Toxic Expertise project, although weren't fully bounded by it. The Toxic Expertise project was a European Research Council funded project, so a large kind of research funded project, that spanned five years, starting in 2015 and extending to 2020, with a team of interdisciplinary social scientific researchers. And the key question that we were asking actually was related to the toxic effects of pollution, particularly petrochemical pollution. So pollution that comes from that very problematic, dirty industry at the intersection between the oil and gas and plastics industries, the petrochemical industry, which produces 80% of its markets are for plastics, and 99% of what their raw materials are oil and gas, and many are, in fact, oil and gas companies, although some are also multinational chemical companies. And one of the problems with petrochemical pollution – and pollution more broadly – is that it is very, very difficult to prove, without a doubt, epidemiologically speaking, that harm from that pollution has caused illnesses in communities. It basically has such a high threshold that a lot of people have to have very terrible deaths or illnesses, and then there needs to be really big court battles in order to prove that often, so that it's often the most – I don't know – visible cases that are brought to public attention or have a lot of activism behind them, or those with communities that have a lot of resources to draw that pressure. So the idea of Toxic Expertise was to look on a more systematic level at this industry, which is in – you know – 1000s of manufacturing sites around the world, it's in almost all of our products. And to look at the corporate power side of it, so doing a study of how the industry works, who the major players are, as well as looking at what are known as fenceline communities, people who live in very close proximity to those polluting plants, and we looked, in particular, at three of the largest producers of petrochemicals in the US, China and in Europe. And so that's what our team did. And gradually it kind of – although we initially started looking at toxicity and pollution – it sort of, we started to see, oh, well, actually, it is fully implicated in climate and waste, politics and, and it's so much bigger and so much messier than we had initially thought. So that was the broad strokes of the project.

Alexis Hieu Truong  15:17 
Can you maybe just like, expand a bit on this, like the difference between, kind of like, studying toxicity and studying toxic expertise? Like, what does this – this kind of concept – toxic expertise actually refer to in the context of that project?

Alice Mah  15:32  
Okay, yeah. The toxic expertise, it's a double entendre, so, so it's sort of expertise about toxicity. That's what I was trying to explain, that it's quite uncertain and difficult and politicised and contested, but it's also the double entendre is about the toxicity of expertise itself, and there getting at issues around corporate negligence or corporate denial of claims, and also the ways in which that level of uncertainty is exploited by business interests to be able to refute claims or to continue harmful practices. So it's about how the double-edged sword of expertise, on the one hand, expertise is absolutely essential, given in our systems, to be able to sort of pinpoint and measure and hold accountable, you know, perpetrators of pollution, at least in the systems that as they're set up, that the double, the double bind is that expertise can be used against communities, scholars, activists who are trying to produce that expertise to mobilise justice.

Rosie Hancock  16:46 
I mean, I'd imagine that in the course of that work some people would have asked you – or at least wondered – what plastics and petrochemicals have to do with sociology? And I mean, there are various ways in which I feel like this is clearly deeply sociological. I mean, you know, you mentioned sort of, that there are sort of, you know, waste politics and that there's a variety of different things going on and it kind of, they cut straight to the core of sociological themes like intersectional inequality. And in the case of pollution, I think you've already mentioned that that we're seeing very clearly how it's often marginalised communities who pay the highest price, so, you know, living alongside extreme air pollution in cities around the world. Could you give us an example of sites that you visited that illustrate something like that?

Alice Mah  17:41 
Environmental justice, where deepest harms felt by the most marginalised communities, it is a very sociological kind of area of research. Many of the key environmental justice scholars are sociologists. Probably the most stark example of environmental injustice that I witnessed was in China, in a para-urban area of Guangzhou which is sort of on the outskirts of the city, where it actually resembles more of the countryside, in some ways, kind of a rural setting, which is what it originally was, where people are located very close to petrochemical plants. We also looked at very similar para-urban villages in Nanjing. In those places, the pollution is so staggeringly bad that, you know, fish are dead in the ponds, people are quite resigned, in a way, like who will talk to the normalcy of it. So they just shut their windows when the wind blows. They're allowed to retire early if they work in particularly toxic parts of the industry. There's no kind of recourse to getting compensation for that. That's what you get. You get a few years knocked off of your, your, your pension, or like the time when you're allowed to retire. Where the most severely impacted people are migrant workers who don't have the same residency rights or rights to health care or housing, who come to work in these great polluting industries and cannot go to petition the companies. Where they report regularly illegal dumping of waste products in the, in the night where it visibly contaminates water and kills off species. And yeah, it's just, these are places actually where there haven't been environmental justice protests in the same way as in other parts of China, where maybe there's more extreme cases, or in other parts like in the US, in an area that our team also looked at in Louisiana, which is quite widely known internationally as an area where this happened. So the kind of, yeah, a sense of despondency and also just severity of the situation there, in the absence of actually much political action, that was quite unsettling.

Alexis Hieu Truong  20:24 
And of course, sociology is also valuing its interests with like discourse, narratives, delegitimation of claims to truth and so on. Like you've written about how we need to interrogate things like untruths and about, like, the trope of reality versus fiction, and this kind of has had me thinking about, like, the sociology of ignorance and things like strategic unknowns. Could you, like, actually give us an example of how this kind of thing has been already looked at within sociology and related disciplines? I'm thinking about, let's say Markowitz and Rosner's “Deceit and Denial” as a landmark work in that area.

Alice Mah  21:08 
I've been very influenced by the research on strategic ignorance. Lindsey McGoey, work on strategic ignorance is also really important there. Markowitz – if you want me to talk about Markowitz and Rosner's Deceit and Denial book, which was an exposé of how a number of different industries that cause harm to health through their products deliberately deceived the public about their, the harmfulness of their products. So many people are familiar with the tobacco industry, but this is played out time and again with things like lead. And in relation to petrochemicals, they gave a very detailed exposé of how in the 1960s and 1970s the American and European petrochemical industries together, like all the big ones, conspired together to conceal the scientific links between one of their main products – which was vinyl chloride – and cancer, and other illnesses that were very traceable to vinyl chloride, in order to protect their market. So they started to basically notice that workers were developing rare cancers and rare degenerative illnesses, and put scientists onto the case to find out – sort of in secret – whether there was a link, and then they found out that not only was there a link, but it happened at very low rates of exposure, and they just kept a wrap on it. And the paper trail that was recorded by Markowitz and Rosner shows that they deliberately deceived public regulators about it. There's documents going back and forth about keeping it to themselves, and it wasn't until there were several incidents of this very rare cancer linked to vinyl chloride workers in 1974 which led to these public alarm bells going off, and the regulators catching on, and then, you know, they banned those products and regulated exposure limits. And I think it's quite interesting, because that deceit and denial, as Markowitz and Rosner call it, is a tactic that the industry used, and it's one that they've continued to do so, but have perhaps been sometimes more careful about how they leave a paper trail.

Rosie Hancock  23:45 
I mean, it feels like we're kind of coming back around to our theme of toxic. You know, we said in our intro that there is some pop culture connotations, I can't help but think of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Simpsons, because I'm a child of the 90s. But how did, how did you think about toxicity in your work, and how do you think that challenges the common sense understanding of toxic?

Alice Mah  24:11  
I mean, I think toxicity is a different sort of category, in a way, than a standard sociological kind of category, if you like. So a lot of sociologists will unpack, you know, something social, and then and then taken for granted assumptions about that will then be kind of uncovered. But toxicity, in a material sense, is more or less understood to be in the domain of science. I think one of the difficulties here for sociological engagement is that kind of sense of disciplinary silos, where how can we as social scientists – or social, sociologists – understand what is toxic if we're not in that field of toxicology or epidemiology? But within the branch of, actually, Science and Technology Studies and Environmental Justice Studies, there are sociologists who would say, well, actually, if you look at the scientific understanding of toxicity, that in itself is complicated, it's uncertain, it's very difficult to measure, the thresholds of at this level it's safe, at this level it's not safe, these are socially and politically produced. I think, yeah, then there's also the extent to which those elements of where there are business interests involved in producing things that are toxic and that have uneven social effects, so that some people are more disposed than others, and so it can be still sustained if people don't kind of become aware of the side of it that is harmful. So, there's this element of, for a sociologist, I think there's a risk in going down that track of saying, oh, okay, well, toxicity is uncertain and it's socially and politically produced, because that is precisely helpful to those business interests that would, would actually – I mean, in that research literature on deceit denial or on manufacturing doubt, about, say, tobacco – you say, oh, well, yeah, it's very uncertain, it's very difficult to know about that science, so it's very, yeah, it's very political, it's very contested, but there must be some sort of scientific truth that we can align with. So it can feed into and undermine social, social and environmental justice causes if you, if you go too far down that track. So while it is true to an extent – and it's also borne out in terms of just the political and social realities of how these things are structured – it is a bit risky then. So then you get kind of trapped then to say, well, actually, no, there is science that can be produced to challenge that. So in a way, then, the sociology is quite complicated, because it's about effectively navigating the ethics as well as the kind of knowledge basis for understanding toxicity.

Alexis Hieu Truong  27:10 
So that, that uncertainty is like, it goes beyond like measuring, like parts per million of plastic in your water and so on right. And then we start really to take – as as you've shown – how like those various levels, like, well, this level is acceptable for this population and not for this population and so on, right? So the the power relations between the powerful and the marginalised. Talking about like the plastics and petrochemicals industry sociologically, has also led you to take on common assumptions of time and space. Like so, for example, I think you point out that anti-plastics activism, like, didn't start in the West, it started in South Asia. And you also note that environmental injustice didn't begin with the discovery of fossil fuels, like instead we need to look kind of back through the history of colonialism. In showing the value of taking the long view, you write of deep planetary time. Can you tell us more about that concept?

Alice Mah  28:17 
Yeah, so deep planetary time. I think that sociologists often are quite bounded in terms of thinking about the history of the discipline in a way, or the emergence of capitalism as sort of the typical frame of reference. I think when it comes to environmental toxicity issues and climate issues, that these do have very, very deep roots. And, you know, the point that that I made in, in the book about – Petrochemical Planet – about the need to consider longer term time scales, I mean, that's not my my point. That's something that many indigenous scholars and black scholars have written about, about how fossil fuels were based on the reliance on slave labour to create those forms of energy, and how the first contact –the origins of colonisation, many hundreds of years ago – was a case of injustice, of land dispossession and extraction of resources. And you can trace those histories much further back than capitalism, whereas I think sociology often has kind of capitalism or the kind of modern capitalist globalising era as its point of critique. And, yeah, I'm interested to think about what it could mean – and this is an open question – to study a deeper time scale. And I'm inspired by work of people like the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, who I think is interesting because I think – as far as I read it –  Chakrabarty took a journey. And I think this, and this is what a lot of social scientists and historians and, you know, scholars ought to do, is always be thinking of their careers and their intellectual journeys, or their activism – whatever they're, they're doing in their lives – as a journey. Because Chakrabarty starts off with this sort of postcolonial, deep suspicion of the universal, saying, you know, there's, there's this universalising 'we', which is sort of flattening out difference, and that we need to think really about capitalism and, and all the, all the problems of, that it involves related to modernity and progress and, and these sort of assumptions. But at the same time, Chakrabarty then says, well, a critique of capitalism doesn't really get at the crisis of climate change and species history. And so Chakrabarty says, well, there's this actually distinction – and Chakraborty is not the first to make that distinction, there are other, many other scholars too – between the global, which is related more to capitalism and the planetary which is related more to deep time and to species thinking. And it's not a matter of saying one's better to think about than the other. But it's more about saying, well, you need, we need collectively to think of different ways of thinking, to think of these contradictions of what they call the “conjoined histories of species and capital”. I think that's quite profound and I do think actually that sociology has been quite slow on the – going back to the more than human – to think about that sort of species level of, I guess, intervention and reflection.

Rosie Hancock  31:50 
Yeah. I mean, you know, based on, based on your experience researching in this field, is this difficulty – maybe – to conceive of larger timeframes, innate, something kind of innate to human nature, or in some way, maybe like socially constructed? And, you know, maybe, would you say our potential to think long term might have been compounded by toxic expertise itself? I guess, I mean, you've you just kind of said that sociology maybe has struggled a little bit to think in these longer time scales, but or different time registers, perhaps. But I guess I'm wondering what role you'd see sociology playing in countering some of the kind of problems that we're facing?

Alice Mah  32:33  
Thank you, going for the really hard hitting questions. As sociologists, I would say we're probably all suspicious – as of anything – where we say it's innate, so I wouldn't want to venture to say anything is innate. But I would say that I think through doing this kind of research, I started especially thinking about ecofeminism and about dualistic thinking and relational thinking. And what I mentioned a bit about about then, sort of more than human ways of thinking, linked to different strands of I guess – I'd hesitate to say non-western, because it exists in all cultures, but – it's, I would say it's maybe not dominant knowledge anyway, it's alternative forms of knowledge. That those alternative ways of thinking that are non-dualistic and that are more relational have been lost in the modern capitalist era, and that sociology –  broadly speaking – is part of that project as a kind of discipline. I think that attending to power and inequalities is very important, but I don't think that – so, mean, it would be kind of almost ridiculous to say that sociology is going to be the thing that saves us from the environmental crisis. It has to be something that's interdisciplinary. It can't be something that's obviously just academic. It has to be related to policy and action. And the real challenge, I've found, actually, is that I kind of started thinking about the role of sociology, and my commitment to sociology, and kind of in that, kind of almost naive way, like, if only people knew about, you know, all this corporate negligence that's going on, all these, you know, ways in which things are being hidden. If everyone knew the scale of the injustices involved, then they'll do something about it. But, of course, knowledge in itself doesn't lead to action, and it won't necessarily motivate change. So I think sociology is helpful for constantly reminding people and doing research that's rigorous, that shows that this is a social problem. It's not just a technical problem. It's one that more sociologists should engage with, rather than those who are maybe less confident to venture into the science and tech, scientific and technical. But it's also one of, you know, basically science communication and politics, and that's a really different kind of space. So that, yeah, that's my, my take on it. I don't know if that's very helpful.

Alexis Hieu Truong  35:12 
Okay, so a bit of doubt that sociology will save us all from this. But at the same time, you mentioned like action and change, okay. Like in your work – and going back to this theme of scale, right – you argue that there's a rising opportunity to take on the plastics industry through multiscalar activism. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Alice Mah  35:36  
Yeah, okay. So one day it's rising opportunity, the next day it's, you know, tiny, tiny fledgling, you know, possibility. So it depends on where, where one is. But yeah, in the research that I've done – and I wouldn't say that this is like a new, big concept or something – it's, it's just that, I think, starting that research on the petrochemical industry, prior to the declaration of climate emergencies, prior to the viral videos that everybody was watching about plastic straws and, and, you know, the David Attenborough Blue Planet film, that where people sort of switched on in limited spaces to these environmental issues. A lot of these fenceline petrochemical struggles were at the level of, you know, there's a plant in somebody's back garden, or, like, that's poisoning their community, and they face this uphill battle. Maybe rally some resources, hopefully nationally, and get some attention and then maybe win a court battle. But I think often those struggles end up that the plant moves somewhere else, so the place of contamination and harm shifts, the systemic issue continues. So although there have been these issues since 1970s and 80s in this place in Louisiana, known as Cancer Alley, where there was very strong agglomeration of toxic polluting industries and environmental racism, is still the case today. So what I notice is that there are increasing connections between interconnected issues, of people coming together from, let's say, climate justice movements, land rights, labour rights, those protesting against plastic waste and waste colonialism and environmental racism. And so, for example, on pipeline disputes that you see solidarities between people opposed to oil from a climate perspective, but also from the pollution from a petrochemical perspective, and farmers and local peoples there, or from the global anti-plastics movement, who starts to join the dots between climate, health, plastics and pollution. And sociologically, I guess I argue that multiscalar activism – drawing on the work of the sociologist Stuart Hall – involves processes of articulation. So this idea that it doesn't have to be a joined up movement of, you know, tens of thousands of people all together at exactly the same time. It's these sort of moments of arbitrary closure within longer term political and cultural struggle in which different elements temporarily unite. So you could start to see that there are different nodes and networks being fought on different scales and fronts against a harmful expansion of the – broadly speaking – the, the oil, petrochemical and plastics complex. So that's what I point towards in terms of some of the movements and some of the interventions that I looked at and I also make the point that these don't always have to be really big scale. Like it's not always about scaling up activism, making it bigger, but it's also about these other ways of like, scaling across or burrowing below. So these, according to different capacities and different contexts, so it always has to also be attentive to context. It doesn't make sense to just have a one-size-fits-all kind of model of activism and change.

Rosie Hancock  39:16 
Alice, before we close part one, it's, I mean, it's very tempting to ask for a bit of reflection on where hope lies. I mean, we've just been talking about some pretty cool, you know, activism, you know, and this is often what you would want to do in discussions of climate change and futures, so that we don't all, you know, feel incredibly depressed. But I wonder whether you'd, you'd kind of want to challenge this kind of always turning for a hopeful story in trying to end our narrative here on a positive note? Are we producing our own form of toxic expertise or our own form of denial?

Alice Mah  39:54 
Well, that's quite a bold way of putting that question. Yeah. I mean, I think you can argue about terms, right, like, and I would say that both of those books that I wrote, yeah, I tried it and somehow to be a bit more hopeful. And a lot of the quest was about seeking some sort of practical action that you can imagine will be helpful. And I think it's, for myself, I definitely feel like – and, yeah, I know that there's a critical literature on the very idea of hope – I feel like the falseness of sort of just saying that everything will be fine, I think that's quite a different thing than, you know, keeping on fighting and finding joy in small wins, or still trying to do, make the world as better, as much of a better place as you can. So this idea that, you know, oh yeah, well, we're just going to turn things around, we'll, we'll get to net zero, we just have to, you know, keep it up and, you know, there's technology and there's ingenuity. That kind of line, this almost flippant idea – that, that, like within certain, kind of, I guess climate policy circles, for example – is really problematic because it's patently does not align with, you know, last year was the hottest year ever, and this year is probably going to be more hot, and last year was record levels of greenhouse gas emissions. But somehow we sorted out this track to get to address the climate emergency, you know, back in 2019 so this kind of, it is a real kind of, I think, cognitive dissonance, this flip to be hopeful in the sense of turning things around. So I think more in terms of, you know, we do need to accept that there is elements of loss already underway, huge suffering – very uneven – but just because we can register that and acknowledge and feel sad and anxious and all the kind of climate emotions and about that doesn't mean that, that every single, you know, degree or contaminated land isn't worth sort of fighting for, according to what kind of resources that you have or energies. Yeah, it's a difficult one.

Alexis Hieu Truong  42:25 
And has Gramsci contributed to your reflection on this?

Alice Mah  42:31  
Oh, yes, very much. Well, I've been fascinated by Gramsci since my master's and the key, key insight from Gramsci – that this analysis draws on – is the idea of wars, wars of position. The idea of struggle effectively between hegemonic and counter hegemonic forces in society, so those that are more dominant and those are, that are subaltern, as Gramsci writes, or just those who are resisting. The idea that struggles are over – yeah – political and economic futures are not only about blunt domination or power, but that they are fought on cultural fronts. And one of the key insights – and quite actually sobering and disappointing – is the extent to which actually powerful actors like the petrochemical industry really see themselves as being part of a war. They have very militaristic attitudes, the way that they frame the public, regulators, environmentalists, the way that they take risks and understand the world as basically just there for their grabbing in terms of, you know, the scenarios that they play out. So this is based on many years of attending corporate conferences, reading corporate documents and meeting with environment petrochemical managers and executives. And so that kind of sense that these battles are being fought, war-like mentality that not only has dominance in terms of resources, but in terms of the stories, the narratives that are told about, about the industry. So the industry itself relies on this very idea that everything is essential, like everything they produce we can't do without it, that you can, you know, just because plastic happens to be in a lot of goods means that we can't do without any of them, really. So it's sort of an all or nothing kind of way of pitching that. And I would say that that is what needs to be countered, probably more than anything, is that kind of cultural side of how, how inevitable and how impossible and how dependent upon these petrochemicals and plastics that societies are. And I think unpicking that is part of the work of counter hegemonic strategies and part of that multiscalar activism that I was talking about.

Rosie Hancock  45:20 
Yeah, yeah. It's something that I think about in my own work on, on environmental activism. Often, I've done quite a bit of work with religious environmental activism, and I find that tension can be there as well, this, you know, this idea that if you believe enough, everything's going to turn out all right, or like that there's some kind of you're working to a higher plan or something like that. It's not, it's not, I wouldn't say it's consistent across all the people I talk to but sometimes you, you hear it, yeah, it can feel, it can feel like a little bit of a tension sometimes. Look, we're going to be back in a moment to talk about a thinker who's inspired you in your own work, since we've just all been inspired by your work. But first a word from Michaela.

Michaela Benson  46:06 
Hi, I'm Michaela Benson, Chief Executive of the Sociological Review Foundation. Thanks for joining us to hear Alice Mah from the University of Glasgow shake up our understandings of all things toxic. We're really enjoying putting season three together so far, and have covered subjects from privilege to the margins, with scholars from around the world. We really hope that you find this podcast a valuable resource for all your sociological and non-sociological inquiries. If you've been to thesociologicalreview.org – perhaps to check out our show notes or our other podcasts – you might have seen that the Sociological Review Foundation is a charity. We're committed to advancing public understandings of sociology, and you could say that this year we need that as much as ever. And so we've got a favour to ask, if you're able to please consider making a contribution to help the Foundation to keep bringing this podcast to you. Just head to donorbox.org/uncommon-sense, and you can find that link in our show notes as well. And there you can make a one off or repeat donation to directly support the making of Uncommon Sense. Thanks to everyone who's contributed so far. Your support is very gratefully received. And of course, we're glad to have you simply listening in, and if you've got any feedback or suggestions, just drop us a line at Uncommon Sense, at thesociologicalreview.org.

Rosie Hancock  47:48 
Okay, so this is the bit of the show where we want to talk about a thinker that has given you some uncommon sense, someone whose work makes you think differently – whether, I mean, you know, whether they're whole oeuvre or just literally a single quote – that's changed how you think.

Alexis Hieu Truong  48:08 
Alice, I understand that you've chosen Dr Max Liboiron, who is Professor in Geography at Memorial University in St John's, Newfoundland and Labrador Canada, where they direct the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR). Can you actually start by telling us a bit more about CLEAR and, just broadly, like the kind of work that they do?

Alice Mah  48:30 
Yeah. So CLEAR is the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research, as you said, is an interdisciplinary plastic pollution laboratory and their methods foreground humility and good land relations. It's quite a unique laboratory, I don't think there's anything else like this anywhere. It's feminist and anticolonial, which means that they have, basically, methods that are very much foregrounding the idea of good land relations. And what I really like about CLEAR is that they're both a plastic pollution lab, a scientific lab, and they're a methods lab, and I think it's, it's the methods part of it that is the most inspiring for myself as a researcher. And I think that, although, a lot of the principles of how to do research, they create protocols for how to establish research collectives and, and think about ideas of accountability in research, I think though those are relevant for social sciences as well as natural sciences. So I think it's, yeah, it's just a really inspiring example of, of how to do research in an ethical way.

Rosie Hancock  49:51  
I mean, how did you – this sounds really like such a, such an interesting group, and I love this interdisciplinary sort of method that they have of working – how did you first encounter them?

Alice Mah  50:05  
I encountered their work through their Discard Studies blog. So this is an amazing blog, you should check out the archives. And they've written a book, as well, together with Josh Lepawsky on Discard Studies, that kind of came out of this work on Discard Studies. The Discard Studies is an interdisciplinary field of study that looks at the systems and the structures and cultures of waste as well as wasting, and it extends beyond just thinking about, say, trash and recycling materials to also include people and landscapes and different ways of life. And it very much challenges ideas that we know what waste is, that because everybody you know throws stuff out, and this idea that it could be managed through technical practices only. It is quite sociological in that sense, it sort of, instead of taking waste for granted it examines waste as being social, cultural, economic, political, historical. So that's how I first encountered their work and then followed, followed it since and been very much inspired by their very important book “Pollution is Colonialism”, which came out in 2021. My favourite quote from that book, the one that kind of sums it up, is this idea that the reason that pollution is colonialism – which is quite a, you know, that is a quite a bold statement, that it is, is not just like colonialism,  is colonialism – is that pollution, effectively, is the “assumed entitlement to use land as a sink”.

Rosie Hancock  51:42  
Wow, yeah. I mean, you know, could you, you've just talked about how pollution is colonialism, and I know that CLEAR names on its site they use anticolonial research methodologies. Could you elaborate on, on what that might mean in the context of this research?

Alice Mah  52:03 
Well, I mean, I think anticolonial rather than decolonial, drawing on this influential article or work by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor”. Decolonisation is important to talk about, but unless you're literally going to be giving back land, or unless it's sort of taken quite a bit more seriously, it shouldn't just be used as a catch all for, you know, adding a name to a curriculum and so on. And anticolonial also kind of recognises that there's no such thing as – like drawing on the work of Mary Douglas on waste, actually, and impurity – this idea that there is no such thing as purity. It's not as though you can just extract yourself from or exempt yourself from being within colonial systems that we seek to oppose. So this idea that being anticolonial is always within that context, and so too are our methodologies. So whether that's science, whether that's as a writer or as a reader, you're always part of these land relations, and you're inextricably – kind of – connected to these aspects of colonialism. And so it's sort of thinking, then, what do you do? And so there it's basically about ethics and values, so it's sort of being, taking more accountability for decisions that are taken in doing science and in doing research, and that – counter to what some scientists might claim in the natural scientists – doing science involves taking certain kinds of decisions. So they say, like asking some questions and not others. So some kinds of questions might lead to more harm, if you're looking only at, say, mortality of cod in their example. It's about who you choose to work with and collaborate with, and what you give back to communities, or how you collaborate with them, how you work in solidarity, and recognising that all kinds of questions or forms of measurement, for example, are political. So that knowledge making is political, and that therefore you need to think about your values and ethics there. And I think why it really resonates for me is this very idea, that they insist on, which is the right to doing research is a colonial concept. And that goes back to the idea of pollution being about, you know, not assuming access to land. And I think that social scientists, you know, although you might get consent forms, with the kind of research that they advocate, first, you need to get permission from and not just permission, but sort of discussion, agreement, support, encouragement, invitation from people whose land it is, to do that research.

Alexis Hieu Truong  55:02  
It puts the, kind of a, really a focus on, like, let's say, partnership research, or like participative research, and like these kinds of things that imagine researchers as being kind of more like in a horizontal relationship with people, right? But as you mentioned, there's something extracted, right? There's, there's like, there's an aspect that researchers come in, sometimes they move back out afterwards. So it's like we might be naive in or strategic in the ways that we forget about certain power relations, right, and the consequences of the research, where we do research, right? So when you're talking about the lab, right, what CLEAR does – anticolonial, feminist, interdisciplinary, right – it really, as you mentioned, you've been inspired by this, right? So I'm wondering, like, would you have, like, a few examples, maybe, of how their work has, has maybe changed certain things that you did or were doing in your past projects, or maybe kind of inspired the way that you want to do research from here on out?

Alice Mah  56:08 
One very concrete thing – just in terms of thinking about the kind of work that I do – there's a line in, in their book, “Pollution and Colonialism”, about the albatross and how in the wake of the, all the media attention related to the plastic waste crisis, there are all these images displayed of sort of like dead and injured marine wildlife. And you see that very commonly in journalism and in kind of well-intentioned activists, and certainly, I'm sure I've had a PowerPoint presentation at some point or another that featured that. And they say – and it's kind of an interesting propagation – they say that it's rude to display pictures of dead albatrosses because it misses the wider relations, the land relations between the albatross and the plastics, it turns them into a resource for shock. That kind of uncommon sense thing is like, oh, okay, well, I had never thought about that, it's unethical to display a lot of, kind of, gory scenes from, you know, situations that are violent. I mean, a lot of media does do that and there's that kind of tension between, on the one hand, wanting people to know about something that's bad that's happening in the world, you know, building up that resistance. But then there's the kind of element of extraction or exploitation that, in terms of how you, how you engage with it. So I've never – since then – included any of those sorts of images in any presentations, and that very kind of key idea about assumed entitlement does make me think a lot more about how to engage in research projects in the future. I think it is quite challenging if you do want to do place-based empirical sociological research. But I think, yeah, I thought a lot about things like, you know, climate implications of doing research and, and how you better engage with communities when you're doing research in different places, and how to avoid a lot of those ethical missteps or bad relations. But I also take their point, which is that you're always embedded in it, there's no way that you can just sort of go, okay, well, if I do this, this and this, then, then I'm safe from it, and I'm doing the right thing. And so I think, more broadly speaking, how an ethical researcher should be working anyway is to always be thinking, how can you live best by your values and try to assess different situations to do the most good and the least harm, I guess, I guess in your research.

Rosie Hancock  58:49  
Alice, thanks for introducing us to Max Liboiron's work there and the work of CLEAR. We're going to put all that in our show notes so that everyone can take a look. But before we completely run out of time, this is the place where we wanted to grab just one more thing – if we may – for our show notes, and that is your recommendation of something that speaks to our theme today, not just toxicity, but it could be environmental activism, climate change, we can go broad. And we're talking a pop culture recommendation here. So, really funny thing is, I know that – actually – we've both come wanting to talk about the same movie, because that's kind of like, clearly, the pop cultural reference that everyone needs to be across. So I'm gonna let you tell us about Dark Water.

Alice Mah  59:35  
You know, the reason I chose it is because it is, I guess you could say a message film, in the sense that there aren't very many feature films with, like, big actors where it reaches that kind of audience. And it's a real case against a very powerful company, DuPont, after they contaminated a rural town in West Virginia with perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, which is a type of Forever Chemical, eventually scheduled by the company for millions of dollars. But I think what's really interesting about the fact that it was made into a movie – following lots of really amazing journalism as well – is that I think it's one of those cases where the media attention through film helped to create further action, so not only on further litigation cases. But also to the commitment of the US president to introducing the first standards of regulations for the broader class of chemicals, the parent polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, which is in terms of the case that that movie talks about, it's just one of 10,000 different kinds of Forever Chemicals. And then in the past couple of years, the European Union committing to phasing out all PFAs, banning 10,000 different types. And this is in, yeah, in everything so it's one of the, it's a very, very big impact in terms of affecting consumer markets and affecting corporate practices. And I think that obviously the legal cases that were won by this exceptional lawyer, Robert Bilott, were quite important, but it does show – I guess, going back to what I said about multiscalar activism – that there are multiple ways in which you can draw attention. So it could come from something like a film, something like litigation, activism and regulation and those all coming together, and we're starting to see more momentum. So that's why I think that's quite an interesting film.

Alexis Hieu Truong  1:01:56  
Thank you so much, Alice, it's been so fascinating talking to you today and to learn about so many thinkers that I, at least, wasn't really familiar with. But that's all the time we have for today, so yeah, thank you for joining us.

Alice Mah  1:02:10 
Thanks very much, very much for having me, Rosie and Alexis.

Rosie Hancock  1:02:14  
Thanks Alice, bye. We'll be sure to put the different readings and thinkers Alice mentioned into our show notes, which you can find in the app you're using to hear this and on the podcast page at thesociologicalreview.org. At that site – as ever – you can also take a look at our themed magazine, The Sociological Review journal, and our other podcasts, as well as episodes of Uncommon Sense that relate to this one, on subjects like nature, care and rules.

Alexis Hieu Truong  1:02:42  
We'll be back soon with more Uncommon Sense. Our sound engineer was Dave Crackles, and our producers were Alice Bloch and Emma Houlton. Thanks for listening. Bye.