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Toxicity is imagined as static and singular in many ways. X chemical company led to X pollution in X lake. In many ways the discussion ends there. The blame is pointed toward one individual, rather than looking at the multiplicity of factors that produced the chemical concentration in the first place, not the least to mention Congressman Bill Huizenga’s continued support of bills that lead to the deregulation of environmental standards, such as his votes to sponsorship and support of legislation like H.J.

In terms of local organizing, the duetero capacity comes in waves. I think post-2008 there was a wake up call and after the 2010 census several organizations (mostly NGOs and private businesses in town) attempted to organize around “unity” in Muskegon, capitalizing on the narrative of the economic crisis hitting Muskegon at-large and this propulated myth that no was immune to the crisis.  Thinking of archiving the toxic histories in Muskegon, only one project really comes to mind.

2016 election.. Many toxics came to a bubble. My problem here is I don’t want to exceptionalize 2016 too much because I actually don’t think it was an exception in many ways. But there was something about this particular moment.. So, trying to work through how we can think about this election and concurrent events around the world as exceptional, but not an exception. 

Unity of a downtown for everyone, when housing prices downtown are some of the highest in the county. Downtown housing development

The body of these toxic factories. I keep thinking about “washing away” the chemical toxicity after work each day, but how people I know, my own father included, sweat out dyes and chemicals, staining their clothes, sheets, pillows, etc. What does it mean to sweat out toxicity knowing it will never go away? 

Decaying/falling infrastructure imposing the landscape of the town 

Employment figures/jobs 

Varzi’s “The Whole World Blind” is particularly stirring for thinking about how to engage in visual and multimodal work. As she asks regarding war photographs, “What will we do with this visual information? If we do nothing, are we then simply guilty of voyeurism?” Much of the work that ethnographers engage in and with is embedded in some form of political, social, and patriarchal violence, and the resultant images and theoretical imaginings they produce can possibly contribute to this violence.

The work highlights the easily overlooked "social and psychological impacts" of the nuclear disaster. His photo essay documents "the personal, embodied, and everyday perspective" of people facing toxic conditions at the edge of the zone. Participants in his used disposable cameras to picture the mundane forms of toxicity they live in. Hence, it builds on a classic move: people are offered the ability to diagnose the symptoms of their own condition.In a related article, he uses "double exposure" as a name for  the specific form of toxicity that people living in zone endure.

This project utilizes the disposable camera to bring interlocutors into the process of ethnographic data production. With these photos, Davies provides his viewers with an emic perspective, as we see what his interlocutors chose to share in reference to their experiences living at the edge of the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The photos themselves are not overly disturbing. In fact, many of them capture the mundanity of life in a way that is somewhat charming.