Author: Tommaso Vitale Date: To: ML movimenti Bicocca Subject: [movimenti.bicocca] FLAMMABLE. Environmental Suffering in an
Argentine Shantytown.
Inizio messaggio inoltrato:
> Da: Tommaso Vitale <tommaso.vitale@???>
> Data: 27 marzo 2009 8:14:19 GMT+01:00
> A: ML movimenti Bicocca <movimenti.bicocca@???>
> Oggetto: FLAMMABLE. Environmental Suffering in an Argentine
> Shantytown.
>
> Inizio messaggio inoltrato:
>
>> Da: "Auyero, Javier" <auyero@???>
>> Data: 26 marzo 2009 12:38:28 GMT+01:00
>> A: "jkrinsky@???" <jkrinsky@???>, "amsoc@???
>> " <amsoc@???>
>> Oggetto: Flammable - New Book
>>
>> With the usual apologies for self-promotion.
>>
>>
>> FLAMMABLE. Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown.
>> Javier Auyero & Débora Alejandra Swistun.
>> Oxford University Press, 2009.
>>
>> Surrounded by a large petrochemical compound, a polluted river, a
>> hazardous waste incinerator, and an unmonitored landfill, Flammable
>> suffers from rampant contamination of its soil, air, and water.
>> Strikingly, the nearly five thousand sickened and frail inhabitants
>> doubt or even deny the harmful impact of pollution on their lives.
>> Why do they fail to understand what is objectively a clear and
>> present danger? Drawing upon archival research and over two years
>> of fieldwork, Javier Auyero and Flammable resident Débora Alejandra
>> Swistun explore the lived experiences of environmental suffering.
>> The toxic uncertainty, the authors hold, isshaped by conflicting
>> political and economic forces and by the routine struggle for
>> survival. Combining social analysis with vivid descriptions of
>> everyday life, this book places the environment at the center of
>> the study of urban marginality, describing the effects of
>> contamination and explaining the puzzling and contradictory
>> meanings its residents ascribe to it.
>>
>>
>> Advance praise for Flammable
>>
>>
>> The authors have accomplished an astounding analysis of the
>> destructionphysical and psychologicalof a people living in
>> poverty, their world dominated by a multinational corporate giant
>> whose toxic waste pollutes their everyday lives. This superb and
>> moving political ethnography captures the meanings of contamination
>> to the residents, who live in disasterimmobilized by the toxic
>> uncertainty, powerless confusion, and mistake that ultimately
>> normalize risk and danger.Diane Vaughan, author of The Challenger
>> Launch Decision
>>
>> In this stunning book, Auyero and Swistun dissect the slow-motion
>> human and environmental disaster wrought by the noxious mix of
>> economic dispossession and extreme pollution in a slum of Buenos
>> Aires. By disclosing how residents experience toxic uncertainty
>> in everyday life, they show why this poisonous habitat not only
>> assaults their individual bodies, but also ravages their social
>> defenses and cultural immunity. With its deft integration of
>> fieldwork, social theory, and narrative, Flammable is a signal
>> contribution that will be widely discussed, often emulated, but not
>> surpassed for a long time to come.Loïc Wacquant, author of Urban
>> Outcasts
>>
>> This brilliant ethnography of a polluted shantytown opens a new
>> theoretical and topical frontier for urban poverty studies. The
>> authors show how impoverished, poisoned residents, compelled to
>> scramble for their daily economic survival in the context of larger
>> political economic forces, are buffeted by competing discourses of
>> agents of the state and civil society. They become trapped in a
>> misrecognized toxic environment that imposes tremendous and ongoing
>> physical suffering, psychic anxiety, and paralyzing uncertainty on
>> them.Philippe Bourgois, author of In Search of Respect
>>
>>
>>
>> Javier Auyero
>> Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Professor of Latin American Sociology.
>> Sociology Department. University of Texas, Austin
>> Editor, Qualitative Sociology
>>
>> Address: Department of Sociology. 1 University Station A1700.
>> University of Texas at Austin. Austin, TX 78712-0118
>> Phone: 512 232 8073
>> Email: auyero@???
>> http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/sociology/faculty/profiles/Auyero/Javier/ >>
>>
>
