In response to the AusSTS conference theme, this lecture will explore different meanings of “generation” to consider several facets of the slow violence of lead exposure. In his 2011 book, Rob Nixon introduced the phrase “slow violence” to describe “attritional catastrophes,” like long-term environmental pollution, that do grave harm to people and communities but lack the speed of spectacular, immediate explosions of violence. Prolonged lead exposure is a paradigmatic example of slow violence. Lead is a mined material that has been poisoning people since at least Roman times. Countless generations have been exposed to lead, altering their brains and other organs and affecting their reproduction. While regulatory interventions since the mid-20th century have stemmed some of the pathways to lead exposure, lead is still an important global commodity as well as a pervasive environmental contaminant in homes, yards, schools, and workplaces.
Generation, generations, intergenerational justice, and regeneration are all themes of the last century’s struggles over lead. The generation of environmental lead has been an inherent part of building and maintaining a social order that depends on cars for transportation, high energy consumption, and natural resource extraction for economic growth. The longevity of the lead industry has depended, in part, on successfully pursuing “next-generation” products—like the new kinds of lead batteries it promotes today. But the story of lead is also populated with healers of the wounds of slow violence. Generations of scientists have called for regulations on the lead industry, caregivers are fighting for intergenerational justice in places heavily burdened by lead pollution, and gardeners are regenerating healthy soils in polluted urban neighborhoods. Many forms of knowledge-making, over long timescales, have made lead an apprehensible and urgent threat.
Abby Kinchy is a sociologist, working in the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS). Her research examines the relationship between science and democracy, with two main objectives: 1) to illuminate how science shapes politics and policy making, and 2) to understand changing forms of public participation in the making of science and technology. Kinchy's research and teaching focus on topics relating to agriculture, ecological sustainability, and environmental justice. Most recently, Kinchy's research has focused on the politics of "citizen science"—public participation in scientific research. Her book on this topic, co-authored with Aya H. Kimura, is Science by the People: Participation, Power, and the Politics of Environmental Knowledge (Rutgers, 2019). In addition, her current NSF-funded project, Nuestros Suelos/Our Soil, explores how citizen science could help urban communities to identify heavy metal contamination in soil and to advocate for solutions. She previously led the NSF-funded Watershed Knowledge Mapping Project, which examined the practices and politics of environmental monitoring in the context of shale gas development, or "fracking." Kinchy's work extends beyond the politics of citizen science. She is the author of Seeds, Science, and Struggle: The Global Politics of Transgenic Crops (MIT, 2012). She is also a co-organizer of STS Underground, a research network that advances social science research on the technoscientific dimensions of mining, burial, and other forms of subterranean exploration.
