Conjuring the past: Slow violence and the temporalities of environmental rights tribunals

Abstract

In his 2011 Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon argues that the ‘slow violence’ of environmental collapse - the too often ‘invisible’ violence that unfolds over decades or even centuries, from the acidification of the oceans to the radioactivity of depleted uranium – represents a formidable representational challenge for contemporary environmental activists. In an era in which ‘the media venerate the spectacular and when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need’, the challenges of making visible the ‘staggeringly discounted casualties’ associated with environmental destruction are both substantial and urgent (2011: 3). Based on ethnographic ..