Description du projet
Étudier notre réaction à l’exposition aux produits chimiques
Les produits chimiques de synthèse sont largement utilisés dans le monde. Les substances per- et polyfluoroalkylées (PFAS) sont les produits chimiques d’origine humaine les plus répandus qui s’accumulent au fil du temps dans l’organisme humain et dans l’environnement. La biosurveillance humaine a permis de détecter une série de PFAS dans le sang des citoyens européens. Dans ce contexte, le projet Embodied Ecologies, financé par le CER, examinera les effets cumulatifs inconnus de ces expositions. Plus précisément, il s’agira d’étudier la manière dont les personnes vivant et travaillant dans les villes ressentent les expositions chimiques dans leur vie quotidienne et agissent en conséquence. En outre, il créera conjointement des outils de réduction des risques et des stratégies visant à atténuer les effets de la toxicité des produits chimiques. Le projet entend également développer de nouvelles approches écologiques pour étudier la manière dont les personnes comprennent et agissent face à des expositions chimiques potentiellement toxiques.
Objectif
Among the existential threats that require lifestyle and policy changes for humans to live within the boundaries of planetary sustainability, one issue remains both under-studied and under-regulated: our growing use of synthetic chemicals that accumulate in our bodies, leading to a range of serious health problems. There is a grim, emerging consensus that the problem is beyond our control, with the unknown cumulative effects of exposures rendering the establishing of causal relationships between exposures and health effects impossible.
This multi-sited study working across scales (individual, community, city, nation) and disciplines (anthropology of the body, creative cartography, urban political ecology, experimental governance) is set in two Western European and two Southeast Asian cities that have adopted green policies but differ starkly in their regulatory environments. By focusing on what ordinary people and city planners do to avoid or reduce chemical exposures and the concerns that inform their practices, we gain insight into the structural constraints that enable and/or constrain their ability to protect themselves—insights that will inform new harm reduction strategies that present pathways to transformative change. The project has four key objectives that correspond to its subprojects:
1.Study through multi-modal ethnography how people living and working in cities sense, know, and act upon chemical exposures in their everyday lives.
2.Visualize through multi-layered cartography the accumulation of toxic chemicals in human bodies and how political, economic, social, and regulatory forces shape uneven exposure.
3.Co-create novel harm reduction tools and strategies based on in-depth learning from existing efforts to mitigate chemical toxicities.
4.Develop novel ecological approaches for studying how people experience, understand and act on potentially toxic chemical exposures and how political, economic, social, and regulatory forces constrain/enable action.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
ERC - Support for frontier research (ERC)Institution d’accueil
6708 PB Wageningen
Pays-Bas