"The Geography of Chemicals: From Colonialism to a Just Ecology?" — talk by Prof. Dr. Andrew Barry (UCL)

All welcome to the second event in our new interdisciplinary and international series of talks titled "Just Ecologies":

The Geography of Chemicals: From Colonialism to a Just Ecology?
Prof. Dr. Andrew Barry, University College London

Colonial prospectors, mining companies, and scientists, were long concerned with the uneven geographical distribution of mineral deposits. Indeed, the British chemist William Jackson Pope once advocated the need for a field of chemical geography, which would map the planet’s natural chemical resources for the benefit of empire. In this talk I turn from the colonial geography of natural chemical resources to consider the uneven geography of industrial chemicals and their by-products, the toxicity of which became increasingly apparent in the late twentieth century. If chemical geography was once proposed as a colonial field that should focus on the uneven geography of resources, what form of chemical geography would be attuned to the uneven geography of toxicity, and the questions of ecological justice that follow?

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"Just Ecologies" is a talk series that focuses the politics of ecology on systemic injustices and the struggles for justice they have been met with.

All lectures take place Wednesdays (except 30.11) from 17:30-19:15 | | All welcome; first come first served.

Organizer: Prof. Dr. Eray Çaylı (with Dr. Adnan Mirhanoğlu) from the Institute of Geography & the "Violence and Security" profile initiative. 

Questions: anna.wagner@uni-hamburg.de