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A sweeping scholarly spread

Carla DeMarco
car.demarco@utoronto.ca
Zoe Wool

Although Zoë Wool is now an award-winning academic with her imprint on many areas of research and widespread collaborations, as a teenager her far-ranging interests did not exactly sync up with scholarly pursuits.

“I actually almost got kicked out of high school because I had a bunch of learning disabilities that I didn’t have the right scaffolding around,” says Wool in a recent interview on VIEW to the U podcast.

“So, when I was in this difficult period of my adolescence, and one of my therapists said ‘just wait until you get to graduate school,’ I thought ‘what are you talking about? I’m not even going to finish high school!’ But in the end, she was totally right.”

Now an assistant professor in UTM’s Department of Anthropology and Director of the TWIG Research Kitchen, a newly launched feminist research space focused on experimental approaches to studying toxicity, waste and infrastructure across the social sciences and humanities, Wool said she just squeaked by in high school, and that post-secondary education, graduate school in particular, which she completed at UofT, gave her the freedom she needed to expand her eclectic curiosities and form crucial connections.

Wool’s work spans an impressively broad range of topics including medical and sociocultural anthropology, examining the harms of war and the enduring environmental effects of military intervention.

But at its core, she says most of her work centers around the body.

“I draw on critical disability studies, and on feminist science and technology studies, as well as queer theory, which together helps us to think about the body as a social and historical object, rather than as just a natural object,” says Wool.

Her work also has a particular focus on the toxicity of war and harms to the body with injured soldiers.

Related to this thread of war, Wool has had an ongoing project since 2017 with collaborators Kenneth MacLeish, an associate professor of medicine, health, and society at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, and more recently Kali Rubaii assistant professor in anthropology at Purdue University in Indiana, examining the harms of the toxic burn pits the US military have used at operating bases around the globe that came as a result of the invasion of Iraq.

“They have tens of thousands of people living on these bases that have no waste-management infrastructure,” says Wool.

“Deployed US soldiers produce about three times as much waste per day as their US counterparts, and that waste comprises everything that you can imagine – plastic water bottles, Styrofoam meal trays, e-waste from high-tech buildings on the operating bases, as well as munitions, vehicles, uniforms, paint cans, batteries, and human waste. All of that waste gets collected into giant holes that are dug in the ground, doused in a diesel jet fuel, and those pits have burned around the clock for years.”

Wool says that people coming out of the military who were based at these sites have been impacted with a significant range of environmental illnesses that corelate to exposure to these waste-disposal fires.

The recipient of several accolades for her work, including the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award and the Rice Interdisciplinary Excellence Award, Wool joined the faculty at UTM in 2020. Prior to that she did postdoctoral fellowships at Columbia University and Rutgers University, and also held a faculty appointment at Rice University from 2015-20.

When the campus is fully back up and running, she is excited to be returning to her alma mater.

“I am looking forward to being on the campus where I did my PhD,” says Wool.

“And at UTM, where I did a lot of teaching as a grad student, there’s all these amazing new buildings, and the campus is completely transformed. I look forward to bumping into colleagues and walking around, seeing the campus move through the seasons, and getting a better understanding of how the campus is situated in the city of Mississauga.”
 

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