Sarah Eleazar Sadiq

SARAH ELEAZAR SADIQ, then a graduate student at University of Texas, Austin, Texas, was awarded funding in October 2021 to aid research on “Ecological Disasters, Toxic Humanitarianism: An ethnographic exploration of contaminated zones in peri-urban Lahore, Pakistan,” supervised by Dr. Kamran Asdar Ali. How does toxicity reorganize water’s life-affirming and life-supporting possibilities in rural South Asia? In this project, the grantee aims to address this question by following material, technopolitical, and social registers of toxic exposure/encounter in the relations, livelihoods, and everyday lives of rural communities living on toxic aquifers. The research will follow the narrative of how a giant hydrosocial assemblage becomes toxic for residents of the neighboring villages of Kot Asadullah and Kalalanwala, in Punjab, Pakistan. Groundwater contamination in the villages was first reported in the media in 1998 after hundreds of school-going children there started developing limb and spine deformities. Since then, the villages have been a site of intense development activity, with several filtration plants, tube-well systems, and water tanks constructed there over the last two decades. Despite these interventions, drinking water continues to reveal high concentrations of toxic chemicals, heavy metals, agricultural runoff and so on. In fact, the village residents claim that birth defects and physical ailments have only increased in the past two decades, and toxicity has become a legacy bequeathed from generation to generation. An assemblage analysis allows me to study the becoming of toxicity as an extrinsic relationship that constructs mutual lived realities and worlds with the hydrosocial assemblage.