The slow violence of air pollution: an educational challenge to what is potentially invisible
The slow violence of air pollution: an educational challenge to what is potentially invisible

Summary/Abstract: In the article - starting from the personal experience of a person living every day in Warsaw, a city struggling with the problem of smog in the autumn and winter - I consider the issue of air pollution in terms of Nixon’s ‘slow violence’ as a violence dispersed in time and space, and potentially ‘out of sight’ (Nixon, 2013). Then, following Thom Davies (2018), treating slow violence as a form of Mbembe’s necropolitics (Mbembe, 2003), I reflect on possible, from the educational point of view, actions that could make slow violence visible and at the same time help citizens to emancipate themselves from the shackles of politics subordinating life to the power of death, reducing it to existence of the ‘living dead’. Referring to the critical reflections of Henry A. Giroux (1988a, 1988b) and the literary reflections of Olga Tokarczuk (2019), I put forward the thesis that critical education, which would be able to create a parabolic story, universalize human experience and thus transcend the boundaries of the ego, has the potential to live up the representational and narrative challenge posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence.

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