Volatility, Atmosphere and Relation: A Multi-Modal Ethnography of Petrochemical VOCs in Toronto, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation draws from feminist science and technology studies (STS) and sociocultural anthropological theory and methods to explore multiple sources of knowledge production about petrochemical derived gases known as volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in Toronto, Canada. A multi-modal dissertation, it brings 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at two fieldsites, a publicly-funded environmental health clinic, and the neighbourhood of South Parkdale together with original archival research, filmic media art, photography produced during collaborative workshops with chronically ill and disabled women, and autobiographical prose. Framed throughout by the key concept of “volatility,” an understanding that petrochemical volatile organic compounds have socially, affective, and economically volatile effects beyond the material, I articulate the uneven intergenerational consequences that everyday, long-term atmospheric exposures to petrochemicals in everyday consumer products have, underscoring intersectional forms of identity and difference. Medical chart review (N=82) and interviews (N=70) reveal how chemical sensitivities in particular are not adequately addressed by the existing highly gendered and classed medical system and disability insurance providers. Drawing on my experiences in housing organizing contexts and navigating rental housing accessibility, I point to how uneven distributions of atmospheric exposures especially impact low-income tenants and are instrumentalized in processes of renoviction (eviction via renovation). Given these stakes, I highlight the crip-led possibilities of collective atmospheric access production. I conclude by suggesting that collective relations to volatility must center how VOCs are signatures of chemical violence in settler colonial Toronto, and thus be foregrounded in relation to the historical and material preconditions of their existence. This is supported by an immanent relationship to material ethics, and building alliances across crip, anticolonial, and antiracist movements.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".