We are living through toxic times. The lethal runoffs of factories, drilling platforms, and mining pits are bleeding out into local ecosystems worldwide, violently slow (Nixon 2011) or eventfully fast (Bond 2013). Petrochemicals are breaking down life in forests, oceans, and human brains, with little promise of breaking down themselves, creating what some have called a “permanently polluted world” (Liboiron, Tironi & Calvillo 2018). Cars, ships, and planes belch out carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at record pace, driving biodiversity loss and smothering cities in exhaust fumes (Ghosh 2025). Medicines, pesticides, and fertilisers that enhance the nourishment and health of some are simultaneously limiting those of others (Vogel 2025; Yates-Doerr 2024). And nuclear plants take centre stage in the imperial threats of warmongering politicians, whose genocidal weapons leave behind trails of chemical waste (Cram 2023). Even when closely linked to conspicuous forms of violence, toxicity unmakes ecosystems, lifeworlds, and bodies in ways that are often as invisible as they are invasive.

The intrusive and often imperceptible nature of toxic materials has prompted various forms of ethnographic attention. Some have detailed how pollution is constituted through pre-existing colonial land relations (Liboiron 2021), and how extractive industries reduce local populations to “storage sites” of chemical output (Graeter 2020). Others have focused on community responses to such violence, including everyday legal and ecological practices (Lyons 2018; Petryna 2013), the “art of unnoticing” pollution (Lou 2022), and the “toxic uncertainty” affecting communities who need to prove the harms of corporate polluters (Auyero & Swistun 2008). Still others have studied toxicity as a distinctly corporeal experience, one that transpires in health and labour inequalities (Calestani 2023; Chen 2012), and that, with e-waste increasingly offloaded to the global South, results in a “toxic postcolonial corporality” (Little 2018).

Yet material substances such as chemicals and microplastics are not the only toxic realities that provoke anthropological examination. Toxicity has also been studied in relation to harmful behaviours that seep into social and psychological realms – and that get under our skin in their own invasive and insidious ways. In its more figurative guises, toxicity has been used to describe masculinities (Gutmann 2023; Harrington 2021), audit work (Valenzuela 2021), and even mortgages (Gudeman 2008). At the same time, scholars caution against approaching toxicity as simply a trait of certain people or things, as this may isolate and individualise its effects from underlying systems such as the patriarchy (Harrington 2021).

Our toxic times have also exposed ethnographic fieldwork to new forms of ethical, methodological, and epistemic scrutiny. Concerns about environmental harm may prompt scholars to refrain from certain practices, such as air travel (Knox 2020) or lab work with chemicals (Liboiron 2021). Moreover, the enduring stability of toxicants such as PFAS may unsettle conventional arguments about the contingency and time-specific nature of fieldwork “truths.” Meanwhile, on an epistemic level, toxicants breathe new life into common anthropological critiques against conceptual purity (Shotwell 2016). The material contamination they lay bare may very well deal the conceptual death blow to modernity’s impermeable dichotomies (see Bond 2021), and foregrounds new forms of relationality, including possibilities for chemical kinship (Agard-Jones 2016; Balayannis & Garnett 2020). Can “contamination as collaboration” (Tsing 2015:27-34), then, help us imagine alternative convivial futures in worlds that were never pure in the first place? And does such future-oriented theorising adequately account for the empirical realities of currently contaminated worlds, where some do the intoxicating and others are intoxicated (Bond 2021)?

For the upcoming issue of Etnofoor, we welcome contributions that explore the ecological and sociopolitical life of toxicity. Topics include, but are not limited to, plastics and petrochemicals, hydrocarbons, mining, farming, electronic and medical waste, urban pollution, grassroots organising, citizen science, and toxic corporate cultures and masculinities. Contributors are encouraged to explore questions such as: How do toxic materials and ideas reproduce and reconfigure existing inequalities, risks, and vulnerabilities? How do various people live with and conceptualise toxicity, along with the temporalities, spatialities, and politics of its emergence and remediation? Which everyday forms of resistance, care, and repair do hard-to-visualise toxicants bring into the light of day? And how do current manifestations of contamination reconfigure and reframe existing anthropological theories and critiques of purity?

We invite authors to submit an abstract of no more than 200 words to editors@etnofoor.nl before March 11, 2026. We also welcome creative contributions such as photo essays or graphic narratives. The deadline for authors of accepted abstracts to submit their full paper is June 15, 2026. The issue is scheduled for the winter of 2026.

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