In this episode of the Toxic Life podcast, co-hosts Krista Lynes and Ayesha Vemuri talk with feminist, decolonial scholar Françoise Vergès about her most recent book, "Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism" (2025). We discuss the racial and gendered dynamics of the work of cleaning, the denial of people's elemental rights to clean air and water, how an abolitionist framework is the answer to racial capitalism, and how we live with toxicity from a place of love.

Show notes:

Françoise Vergès, Making the World Clean (2025)

In this inaugural episode of the Toxic Life Podcast, environmental media scholars Krista Lynes and Ayesha Vemuri ask, What is toxic life? Where do we locate toxicity? How is it unevenly distributed among bodies, places and scales? What is its relation to environmental justice or reparation?

Show Notes:

Françoise Vergès, Making the World Clean (2025)

Olufemi O. Taiwo, Reconsidering Reparations (2021)

Neferti Tadiar, Remaindered Life (2022)Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (2021)