Entanglements of toxicity:an ethnography of the production and circulation of sulfur dioxide

• Grant number: 25/05087-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: October 01, 2025
• End date: September 30, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Theory of Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Renzo Romano Taddei
• Grantee: Juliana Ramos Boldrin
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This postdoctoral project aims to investigate the toxic living conditions that mark the present and the possibilities for the future, focusing on an atmospheric pollutant co-produced with carbon dioxide in industrial processes: sulfur dioxide, a toxic molecule associated with both problems and solutions on a planetary scale. More specifically, the proposal is to conduct an ethnography that traces sulfur dioxide from its production to the attempts to address it in the fight against pollution, starting from the city of Cubatão (SP), a place where poor air quality is an emblematic issue inseparable from the presence of one of the largest Industrial Complexes in Latin America. The goal of the research is to map how this harmful molecule to health, as well as to environment, links multiple scales of time and space, entangling industrial facilities, environmental regulations, public health risk metrics, air monitoring practices, and environmental destruction. The aim is to understand how the production and circulation of toxic sulfur dioxide implicate humans and non-humans in extensive and lasting suffocating entanglements of toxicity that develop through the articulation between technologies of nature governance and political economies of abundance and scarcity. By paying attention to the situated emissions of this pollutant and its multiple effects on human and non-human lives, the research seeks to analyze how planetary-scale problems, such as air pollution, are rooted in localized experiences. Questioning dichotomies between organism and environment, local and global, and the boundaries that separate environmental issues from struggles for social justice, the research aims to contribute to debates on the Anthropocene, climate change, atmospheric politics, and industrial infrastructures.