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Homesick

A small white mobile home is at the center of cover image, with a single window and a pipe protruding from its base. The scene is quiet and minimal, with gravel and asphalt in the foreground and large trees in the background.

Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography

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View the course discussion guide for Homesickhere.

Book

Pages: 256

Illustrations: 27 illustrations

Published: October 2025

Author: Nicholas Shapiro

Following Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) distributed over 120,000 trailers for emergency housing. Produced from engineered wood containing toxic amounts of formaldehyde, these shelters were vectors of illness and death. Although they were subsequently banned, FEMA trailers were resold and again used for housing, scattering their harm to other people and areas. In Homesick, Nicholas Shapiro draws on almost fifteen years working with impacted community members to trace how the story of toxic emergency housing units expands into a story of how all of our shelters became a seat of exposure and how we can collectively struggle for cleaner indoor air. Throughout, Shapiro questions the efficacy of the fundamental tools used to cultivate accountability, repair, and change, arguing for their reimagining. Detailing health effects as well as community and individual efforts to achieve better life, health, and justice, Shapiro highlights how homesickness for an otherwise future can herald meaningful change.

Praise

“Homesick skillfully combines investigative journalism and ethnography in charismatic detail to demonstrate the complex and interlocking structural systems that enable large-scale toxic exposure. Nicholas Shapiro’s evocative writing and commitment to research allows those most burdened by the chemical impacts of power to tell their own expert stories of life, survival, and death. This book is a timely, stellar example of what happens to both research and the researcher when the author lets the case lead them where they need to go. Homesick is a book to contend with.” - Max Liboiron, author of Pollution Is Colonialism

"Beautifully crafted and deeply engaging, Homesick is a stunning ethnography of the expansive predicament that was formed alongside the hope of building affordable mobile homes with ingredients now known to be chemically toxic. Nicholas Shapiro brings readers into the multiple sites of illness, fretting, maneuvering, and optimism to offer a riveting account of the nested domains of formaldehyde toxicity in manufactured mobile homes that make those who live in them, and the homes themselves, sick." - Vincanne Adams, author of Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move

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Price: $28.95

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Information

Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information Funding Information

Author/Editor Bios

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Nicholas Shapiro is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Society and Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Table Of Contents

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Preface  ix
Introduction: Homesick, Otherwise  1
1. At Home in the Surreal  27
2. From Chemical Fetishes to the Late Industrial Sublime  55
3. Un-knowing Exposure  79
4. Environmental Litigation and the Fantasy of Accountability  99
5. Working the Stopgap  125
6. From Policymaking to Alter-Engineered Worlds  149
Acknowledgments  173
Appendix 1  179
Appendix 2  181
Notes  183
References  199
Index  225

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Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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Additional Information

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Related Links Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3244-1 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-2907-6 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6129-8 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478061298

Funding Information

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This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, and the UCLA Library. Learn more at the TOME website.