Lessons on touch: Caring for pesticide exposure in toxic geographies

Abstract As with many other chemical substances, the harmful geographies of toxic agricultural pesticides often remain imperceptible and unknown. Used as a pedagogical tool, touch can help people sense toxic landscapes by facilitating embodied, tactile attention to the everyday slow chemical violence of toxic geographies and thus create openings to cultivate more liveable worlds. Using the case of California’s Central Coast, where pesticides are employed in a racialised biopolitics of expendability against Latine populations, I examine the lessons facilitators teach to sense and reduce pesticide exposure, mobilise for further regulation, and heal their communities through touching and being touched. This article contributes to geographical understandings of chemically entangled places by building on feminist frameworks of knowledge‐making in everyday life spaces, specifically focussing on embodied knowledges and on theories on the ethics and politics of care and affect. I argue that in socio‐material worlds, touch engenders a better grasping of being in the flesh, finite embodiment, interconnectedness, as well as an enhanced sense of our vulnerability to violence and pain. As contact, touch connects multiple temporalities and spatialities while nurturing an ethics of care that raises our accountability and capacity to live better and heal our shared suffering in toxic worlds.