Environmental Health in Negative: A Literary and Ethnographic Approach to Health Justice in Petrochemical Catalonia

Kathryn Gougelet
Anthropology
UC Santa Cruz

In Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain, where olive trees grow on the edges of sprawling petrochemical facilities, it is often taboo to talk about pollution and health. The region’s fraught environmental health politics are deeply entwined with its fascist history and legacies; these politics also resonate with the challenges many communities face in documenting petrochemical harm around the world. In my dissertation, I employ a literary and ethnographic approach to ask: What kinds of methods and genres push beyond the narrative dead ends of industrial status quos? I build a portrait of environmental health in negative in Tarragona by accumulating, assembling, and interpreting vernacular evidence about landscape and embodied transformations in a petrochemical place. While the impulse to fold illness narratives into clinical settings to “humanize medicine” is a familiar move in medical humanities, I cut a new path in my dissertation by tracing the ways in which bodies and clinical settings are always porous to structures of power and environmental change. My “environmental health in negative” approach insists on creative collaborations across medical and environmental humanities to trace new contours of what it means to inhabit a human body in the Anthropocene.