Toxic Imaginary

“In a world filled with carbon pollution, microplastics, and toxic masculinity, the word "toxin" has become a defining term of our time. In Toxic Imaginary, Peeples provides us a critical vocabulary such as the "toxic sublime" and "toxic ecotopia" to help us parse how we come to know, see, and respond to various iterations of toxicity in our environments. From case studies of poignant lived experiences to the pop culture of the comic book, Peeples thoughtfully critiques the various ways that we interface with the toxicity of our more-than-human planet and one another.”—Emma Frances Bloomfield, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of Science v Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators

“With incisive clarity, Jennifer Peeples traces the visual contours and folds of toxin discourses in the global west. Grounded in the ways different cultures imagine toxins, Toxic Imaginary models how cultural imaginaries perspectives can benefit both visual and environmental studies.”

—Kundai Chirindo, associate professor and chair of the Department of Rhetoric and Media Studies, Lewis Clark College

“Humans are poisoning the planet. In so doing, we are poisoning ourselves via the production and release of toxic substances in ways that are often purposely hidden or unseen. In Toxic Imaginary, Jennifer Peeples explores ways that we attempt to symbolically represent toxics as a material phenomenon and human experience. Focusing on a variety of visual rhetorics—warning signs and graphics, photographic images of contamination, comics and other artifacts of popular culture, depictions of human bodies affected by toxic exposure, the reconstruction and reimagining of Notre Dame Cathedral after a fire, and the emergence of new ways of seeing after the nuclear accident at Chernobyl—Peeples demonstrates both the challenges and possibilities of the ‘toxic imaginary’ as a source of rhetorical invention. The book is a product of over twenty years of work in the field—starting with a trip to Vietnam in 2004—and the author grounds her analysis in a felicitous combination of theoretical and critical concepts applied with insight and grace toward her subject matter.”

—Steve Depoe, founding editor of Environmental Communication

“Toxins are all around us—and in us. In this wide-ranging study, Jennifer Peeples shows us how toxins have been made to matter across a wide, multimodal rhetorical landscape. Analyzing diverse materials such as infographics, news stories, art, photography, and comics, Peeples theorizes toxic visual rhetoric in order to invite reflection on the ways in which visuality participates in our cultural understandings of environmental risk. This study will be especially welcomed by scholars and students of environmental communication, risk communication, and visual rhetoric.”

—Cara A. Finnegan, professor of communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“Toxic chemicals saturating the planet while public health and economic justice depend on a toxic media environment—what’s not to like? Plenty, and Jennifer Peeples provides what is needed: a carefully developed vocabulary for making sense of the “toxic imaginaries” that are used both to deny and to challenge catastrophic pollution. Peeples skillfully negotiates the seen and the unseen to help citizens understand how they can demand a better future.”

—Robert Hariman, Owen L. Coon professor of argumentation and debate, Northwestern University