Toxic Imaginary
Visual Rhetoric for a Poisoned Planet
Will be published approx. on 1. December 2026
Book
Hardback
230 pages
978-1-61186-590-5 (ISBN)
Description
Toxins can be found in every body and every place around the globe, yet they are not always visible. Toxic Imaginary explores the multiple ways Western cultures "see" toxins. With incisive vision, Jennifer Peeples examines how individuals and societies use collective stories, images, symbols, and rituals to navigate the uncertainty of living in a toxic environment. Each chapter provides an example of everyday images that make up the Western toxic imaginary and introduces new rhetorical and environmental concepts for readers to critically engage with visual media. Peeples pays particular attention to the injustices and inequities of toxins, revealing how powerful entities use toxic images to obscure the reality that all people live in polluted spaces that are damaging to their health. As the number and potency of contaminants continues to rise, this exploration into how scientists, journalists, activists, designers, and artists make toxins visible is imperative for understanding how people engage with contaminants in their environments.
Reviews / Votes
"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 CommunicatorsMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
East Lansing, MI
United States
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
454 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-61186-590-5 (9781611865905)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Jennifer Peeples is an environmental rhetoric professor at Utah State University, where she is a cofounder of the Heravi Peace Institute and was one of the inaugural fellows at the Institute for Land, Water, and Air. She has been the Distinguished and Outstanding Professor of Honors and won the College of Humanities and Social Sciences prestigious Dean's Giraffe Award for her innovation in the classroom. She also has won the Golden Anniversary Monograph Award and both the Environmental Communication Division Book of the Year and the Christine L. Oravec Research Award in Environmental Communication from the National Communication Association, as well as a number of top paper awards for her work in rhetoric, visual communication, and pedagogy. She is the past president of the Environmental Communication Division of NCA and serves on a number of editorial boards including the Environmental Communication Journal, Frontiers, and the Quarterly Journal of Speech.