Our Chemical Selves

Canadians are suffering the adverse health effects of everyday exposures to common chemicals in their homes, workplaces, and communities – how are current political and social structures enabling these chronic health risks?

Dayna Nadine Scott teaches administrative law, environmental law and justice, and risk regulation. Her research has focused on environmental justice activism, the regulation of pollution and toxic substances, gender and environmental heath, and feminist theory of the body. She is the director of the National Network on Environments and Women’s Health.

Contributors: Bita Amani, Matthias Beck, James T. Brophy, Samantha Cukier, Robert Dematteo, Troy Dixon, Warren G. Foster, William Fraser, Michael Gilbertson, Laila Zahra Harris, Margaret M. Keith, Sarah Lewis, Norah MacKendrick, Josephine Mandamin, Patricia Monnier, Jean Morrision, Jyoti Phartiyal, M. Ann Phillips, Lauren Rakowski, Nancy Ross, Annie Sasco, Dugald Seeley, Adrian A. Smith, Tasha Smith, Alexandra Stiver, Maria P. Velez, Aimée L. Ward, Andrew E. Watterson, Sarah Young.

Kaitlyn Mitchell:
The strength of this work lies in its success at bringing recent developments in science together with legal and policy analysis and recommendations. For anyone interested in women’s environmental health issues, it is a must-read … This book will help to provide researchers, policy-makers and advocates with tools to understand and address links between social inequity, environmental health and gendered differences in chemical exposure and effects

David Kinkela, State University of New York at Fredonia:
Our Chemical Selves is a fascinating book that raises important questions about the impact of chemicals on women’s health in Canada … This book should be read by environmental historians or anyone concerned with the impact of chemicals in our world. Not only do the contributors highlight important issues regarding women’s health, but they offer useful solutions to change our collective indifference toward the intensification of chemicals in our world.

Angela Cope:
The book... provides a wide variety of scholarship on chemical threats from a feminist political economy perspective. It is particularly effective at arguing for both extended producer responsibility for potentially harmful substances and the precautionary principle as a policy adoption strategy when dealing with uncertainties in the science of chemical pollution.

Noël Sturgeon, author of Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Sexuality, Race, and the Politics of the Natural:
A smart, impressively researched, and deeply relevant volume ... It shows how regulatory systems that ignore the interactions of biology and social locations of gender, race, and economic disparity will be inadequate to protect ourselves, our children, and our environment. Highly recommended to all those concerned with the health of our environment, our food, and our families.

Heather McLeod-Kilmurray, Centre for Environmental Law and Global Sustainability and Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa:
This is, to my knowledge, the first book of its kind. It applies a gendered perspective to regulatory challenges presented by chemicals, with a distinctive Canadian voice. It is very well documented, highly readable, very interesting, and timely.

Sherilyn MacGregor, author of Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care:
A timely collection of chapters that are academically rigorous and policy relevant, while speaking from and to personal experiences of harm and resistance by those most affected by everyday exposure to toxic chemicals.