A Life Without Flowers: Toxic Ambivalence, Travellers’ Ways, and Insalubrious Attachments in an Urban Travellers’ Camp

Abstract (English)

(Irish) Travellers’ toxic attachments correspond with the literature on ‘toxic ambivalence’, particularly how pollution can be both harmful and enabling. However, the Traveller case differs from this work in significant ways. Although toxic ambivalence perspectives provide more nuanced engagements with pollution than those focused on slow violence and necropolitics, they still either privilege structural conditions or do not adequately account for toxic inequality and, therefore, are not ambivalent enough. Travellers’ toxic attachments cannot be solely attributed to wide-scale conditions and/or the effects of slow violence, nor can they be subsumed under the category of suffering. Through demonstrating how Travellers derive value from providing solace, care, and company to one another, and engaging in skilful socio-political negotiation, this presentation not only expands literatures focusing on toxic ambivalence, cruel optimism, slow violence and necropolitics, but, by privileging Travellers’ own perspectives, it questions some of this work’s key assumptions and epistemological stances.