Toxic Bios: A guerrilla narrative project mapping contamination, illness and resistance

by Ilenia Iengo and Marco Armiero

By bringing to the fore the affective, bodily and narrative dimensions of environmental injustices, the project Toxic Bios aims to open new paths of collaborative research and grassroots activism focused on “guerrilla narratives” and counter-hegemonic storytelling

Toxic Bios is a Public Environmental Humanities project based at KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm. Building on Richard Newman’s definition of Toxic Autobiography, this project is informed by Stacy Alaimo’s work on transcorporeality and by research connecting the body and environmental justice, as, for instance, Gregg Mitman’s Breathing Space.

Newman (2012) defines Toxic Autobiographies as a literary genre in the US second-wave environmental writing, meaning a distinct product of marginalized groups denouncing the environmental injustice in which they feel trapped. Toxic autobiographies are a prototype of counter-history, which aim to sabotage mainstream toxic narratives particularly those which reproduce or silence injustice through counter-hegemonic storytelling. The toxic…