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“The large question this study addresses is the following: How do people make sense of (and cope with) toxic danger? The Martinezes’ story anticipates the complexity of the answer(s): physical and psychological suffering is compounded by doubts, disagreements, suspicions, fears, and endless waiting.” (4)

‘Flammable is a story of people’s confusion, mistakes and/or blindness regarding the toxicity that surrounds them. Flammable is also a story of silent habituation to contamination and of almost complete absence of mass protest against toxic onslaught’ (4)

“Schoolteachers, journalists, and lawyers are also part and parcel of daily life in Flammable. Together, all these actors contribute to what Flammable residents know about their place. They also influence what they ignore, what they want to know, and what they misrecognize. Government officials, company personnel, physicians, teachers, journalists, and lawyers jointly (but hardly cooperatively, given that their opinions don’t count equally) shape locals’ experiences of contamination and risk. This book examines how and why this production of shared knowledge (or lack thereof ) occurs.” (5)

“All in all, confusions, bewilderments, divisions, rumors, frustrations, and hopes are making Flammable residents wait—they wait for more testing, for further and better knowledge, for relocation, and for the “huge” settlement with one of the “powerful companies” that will, in the words of a neighbor, “allow us to move out.” This waiting is, as we will show, one of the ways in which Flammable residents experience submission.” (6) 

“We did our best to learn how to listen, look, and touch with respect and care, knowing with Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992:28) that “seeing, listening, touching, recording, can be, if done with care and sensitivity, acts of fraternity and sisterhood, acts of solidarity. Above all, they are the work of recognition. Not to look, not to touch, not to record, can be the hostile act, the act of indifference and of turning away.” (14)

‘… the culture of toxic uncertainty is a complex web of meanings and shared understandings’ (108)

Labor of confusion: “During the long period of slowly germinating contamination, the actions of government authorities toward pollution in the neighborhood were less consistent and more contradictory than either the denial or underestimation that has been documented in the existing literature. Those multiple incongruous actions gave shape to what we term, extending the insights of students of ideology and symbolic power (Thompson 1984; Eagleton 1991; Bourdieu 1991), a labor of confusion that has a decisive effect on shared (mis)understandings.” (10)

 Ulrich Beck, social invisibility, lack of “social thinking” about environmental issues (Beck 1992)

Bourdieu, symbolic violence - misrecognition of power structures on part of the oppressed enables domination

Toxic uncertainty: “a way of experiencing toxic suffering that is shaped by what we call, borrowing from Charles Tilly (1996), the interacting “invisible elbows” of external power forces and of everyday routine survival struggles” (6)

Flammable is an account of how people in a particular place make sense of slow, invisible environmental pollution. The people of Flammable live in an Argentinean shantytown located next to petrochemical companies and storage facilities. They have been deeply affected by the rise in unemployment in the 1990s, with most residents subsisting on part-time manual jobs at one of the companies, retirement pensions, state welfare programmes and what else they can find. The area in which these residents live is known and recognized by government experts to be contaminated and unsafe for human habitation–and yet widespread confusion and uncertainty amongst residents and a lack of government actions means that the shantytown continues to exist. Auyero and Swistun explore the multitude of influences that ‘‘shape what people see, what they don’t see, what they know, what they don’t know, and what they would like to know, what they do and what they don’t do’’ (145). They show how residents gradually naturalize their situations, which, combined with the mystification of dominant discourses, contributes to their quiescence in the face of contamination. 

This organizations aims to provide a support system for returning veterans, more specifically to ensure access to any type of medical support they may need and assist them in readapting to society after extended periods of time in the military.

The organization membership includes two subsets, first the organization membership includes any and all active serviceman, veterans, and limited membership for their families. The other portion of membership includes administrators, doctors, and public health workers who work to provide the services needed.

This organization does not respond to disasters, but rather provides long term assistance to members of the military and their families. The issues faced by veterans, both medical and social, are often chronic and require a lifetime of support. This is in a way a constant emergency for them and their families, and the US Department of Veteran Affairs aims to provide the necessary support.

The US Department of Veteran Affairs is constantly adjusting to new medical research to provide the most effective care possible. This shows a differing approach to emergency response which is only possible due to the long term nature of this organization, most emergency response groups focus on quick response to disasters which does not allow for the same amount of research and adaptation as the Department of Veteran Affairs.

The US government is motivated by both the social necessity of reintegrating thousands of active military servicemen every year, and the responsibility of supporting the veterans who sacrificed for this country.

The organization is fully funded by the government, which is funded itself by taxes. This in part effects their work as it creates a responsibility to be careful with funding and ensure that the care goes directly to those in need. It also requires the organization to be held accountable to the citizens who are funding their efforts.

The organization does have extensive data collected from its members on the number of veterans, what kinds of injuries they are facing, and the level of success in rehabilitation among other topics.