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Air pollution is a hybrid phenomenon, understood and produced through social practices and material environmental processes. This hybridity leads us to engage critically with how air quality science is carried out. In dialogue with the critical physical geography subdiscipline, we propose a critical air quality science (CAQS) framework to study air pollution’s sociomateriality. We use CAQS to illuminate four tensions in the dynamics of knowledge production during a citizen science air quality monitoring project: making undone science matter, blurring “insiderness”/“outsiderness”, traffic as both life and death, and changing behaviours versus changing systems. Drawing on interviews with citizen scientists, we outline the implications of these tensions for air quality research design and reporting. The CAQS framework provokes critical thought about the consequences of how air quality science understands, creates and communicates knowledge, and how we can reconfigure our relations with the air to minimise air inequalities.

‘Small states’ is a term of art with no fixed or official definition. It usually refers to countries that are small in land mass and/or population size. There are vast differences, however, among small states. Small Island Developing States (SIDSs) differ in many respects from more affluent small states; a common policy objective among the majority of small states (both developed and developing) is pursuing strategies to capture the economic growth and benefits of the digital economy. This article examines how small states can set frameworks for establishing digital infrastructure, the so-called ‘first pillar’ of the digital economy. Robust and inexpensive information and communications technology (ICT) is the sine qua non of the digital economy. Funding, ownership, control and competition with regard to digital infrastructure are common problems across all small states. This article considers the manner in which three small states approach the first pillar: the Kingdom of Tonga, a SIDS with a lower middle-income level; the Republic of the Seychelles, a SIDS with middle to high-income island nation and the State of Qatar, a high-income small state. For SIDS, we find that majority government ownership of ICT infrastructure is the critical success factor.

Infrastructures have recently been conceptualised as in process and dynamic rather than fixed and obdurate. We introduce the notion of infrastructural value to draw attention to the specific value that can be produced in something in relation to its participation in an infrastructure, its operation and management. We analyse demand-side response (DSR) as a case of infrastructural extension where value is produced in already-existing electricity consuming devices, generating a return for their response to the ends of grid management. We track the work of aggregators who enrol clients and their devices into providing combined synchronised responses contracted with the grid operator. This involves aggregators in activities of temporal prospecting, legitimation, optimisation and coordination. We argue that the notion of infrastructural value helps to articulate the relations between the fluidity and flexing of infrastructural boundaries and value making practices and consider other ways that this category of value might be explored.

Around the world, people living close to polluting industries have different perceptions of the risks of toxic exposure, ranging from anger to acceptance to denial. We draw attention to a case with relatively high levels of social trust, but also relatively high levels of risk perception: the communities living adjacent to the Fawley (UK) oil refinery and petrochemical complex, a site that has been operated by Esso since the early 1950s. Our findings are based on a novel comparative analysis of two qualitative studies of local risk perceptions in Fawley conducted more than two decades apart in 1997 and 2019, incorporating focus group and individual interviews with residents, alongside documentary analysis and stakeholder interviews. Perceptions of risk and trust in the local polluting industry have fluctuated over the years, with unease never far from the surface as industrial employment has slowly contracted. Yet overall, the picture in 2019 was not too dissimilar from that in 1997: while community–industry relations were strained amidst periodic risk incidents and a sense of decline, a cautious sense of trust in the polluting enterprise had endured, based on a delicate balance of heritage, risk, and recognition. We draw attention to the residents’ careful reckoning with risks over time and the tenacity of social trust as an act of negotiation that took risk into account but also included other important factors such as recognition and reciprocity. Local risk perceptions in Fawley are closely bound up with the residents’ shared industrial heritage and enduring perceptions of Esso as a ‘good neighbour’. Our longitudinal analysis allowed us to reflect on changes over time in Fawley, providing greater temporal depth to the risk perception literature.

Energy vulnerability is a multi-dimensional, dynamic and context-specific phenomenon that poses a challenge for equity in energy transition policies. The Capability Approach (CA) is a normative framework focused on people’s opportunities and freedoms, used to address dimensions of social justice. Whereas the CA has been used to assess and measure conditions of poverty, exclusion and inequality, its application to evaluate policies is rare. Building on work that establishes being able to heat the home adequately as a secondary capability towards being able to lead a healthy life, this narrative review maps the conditions and processes that shape this secondary capability in Victoria, Australia. It also evaluates local policies and initiatives aimed at addressing energy vulnerability. The map identifies structural, geographical and cultural phenomena and feed-back loops and exposes a hierarchy of capabilities for vulnerable households that need to be satisfied. The policy review finds that current efforts focus on mitigating inequalities in resources with little evidence for outcomes in security or transformative agency. Future initiatives may give more attention to the satisfaction of the tertiary capability of being able to live in an energy efficient dwelling, customise solutions to the multitude and range of conditions and acknowledge the need of warmth throughout the home.

Environmental and climate justice scholarship has increasingly focused on how knowledge and expertise play into the production of injustice and into strategies of resistance and activist claim making. We consider the epistemic injustice at work within the practices of risk mapping and assessment applied in Rio de Janeiro to justify the clearance of favela communities. We trace how in the wake of landslides in 2010, the city authorities moved towards a removal policy justified in the name of protecting lives and becoming resilient to climate change. We examine how favela dwellers, activists and counter-experts joined efforts to develop a partially successful epistemic resistance that contested the knowledge on which this policy was based. We use this case to reflect on the situated character of both technologies of risk and the emergence of epistemic resistance, on the relationship between procedural and epistemic justice, and on the challenges for instilling more just climate adaptation strategies.

Inspired by Lefebvre’s meditation on the rhythms seen from his apartment in Paris, we develop a novel rhythmanalytic account of urban air pollution, its breathing-in and impact in vulnerable bodies. We conceptualise urban air pollution as entwined in its making and consequence with the diverse rhythms of technologies, social practices and socio-temporal structures, environmental and atmospheric processes, bodily movements in space and time, and rhythmically constituted corporeality. Through this interdisciplinary account we position urban air pollution as integral to the ‘beat’ of the city, both a product of and constituent part of its evolving spatiotemporal form. We build on this foundation to develop a polyrhythmic conceptualisation of how certain places and lives are more dominated by pollution than others. Unequal patternings are made through the structuring effects of rhythmic repetition and by fatal intersections between the rhythms of polluted air and unequal capacities to avoid harmful breathing in and to resist the arrhythmic corporeal consequences that can follow. Understanding inequalities as manifest not within a static landscape of spatial relations, but in sets of unequally unfolding and structured polyrhythmic relations has implications for revealing patterns of inequality and for extending evidence-making more deeply into how rhythms intersect. Which and whose rhythms are to be intervened in are also considered as key ethical and political questions. We draw out implications for activism and community action, and identify the potential for bringing rhythmanalysis into productive engagement with broader environmental justice concerns, including in relation to recent COVID-19 experiences.