Geographisches Kolloquium

Knowing the toxic is a peculiar problem. lt mostly withdraws from the senses, and where it does register, in smell, on the skin, it registers late. Access therefore runs through instruments. Expertise determines what counts as harm, and at what threshold. The knowledge that results is real, yet does little, because it arrives in a form that cannot be inhabited: as value rather than perception.

This talk takes that condition seriously. Working from a thousand years of extraction in the Harz Mountains and drawing on Gramsci's account of common sense, it proposes a shadow epistemology and a historical practice that follows from it: one whose aim is not certainty, but contestability.