Contested science determines who is officially recognized as a pollution victim

Evidence

Maintaining a media focus on slow violence poses acute challenges, not only because it is spectacle deficient, but also because the fallout’s impact may range from the cellular to the transnational and (depending on the specific character of the chemical or radiological hazard) may stretch beyond the horizon of imaginable time. The contested science of damage further compounds the challenge, as varied scientific methodologies may be mobilized to demonstrate or discount etiologies, creating rival regimes of truth, manipulable by political and economic interests. Moreover, the official dimensions of the contaminated zone may shrink or dilate depending on which political forces and which research methodologies achieve the upper hand. What emerges, then, is a contest over the administration of difference between those who gain official recognition as sufferers and those dismissed as nonsufferers because their narratives of injury are deemed to fail the prevailing politico-scientific logic of causation; or for that matter, because they lack the political contacts to gain admission to the inner circle of certified sufferers and thus to potential compensation. These unstable, complex procedures—and hierarchies—of toxic recognition may create novel forms of biological citizenship, as in the long aftermaths of the 1984 Bhopal disaster and the 1986 Chernobyl explosion. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 124

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how ‘toxic recognition’ and hierarchies of certified suffering operate under contested science.
• XREF: Links to ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ not directly, but strongly to corporate doubt-manufacturing from ch8 of this same book and to Soundscape’s toxic-noise exposure recognition battles. — connects to: Pollution victims must narrate their lives in state-sanctioned suffering genres to get compensation — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 131