Sensitive aspects of work activity: essential for risk prevention and health promotion

In prevention processes associated with pesticide risk in agricultural settings, attention is overly focused on the expected benefits of technical prevention measures, to the detriment of a nuanced understanding of pesticide usage and their effects on the health of farmers who use them. Almost like putting the cart before the horse by trying to solve a problem before it has been properly understood and analyzed. A comprehensive approach rooted in ergonomics and anthropology aims to restore this balance and start from the analysis of work activity and the observation of working bodies in motion. In this article, we use these two approaches to understand and highlight the actual and sensitive work of farmers in the use of personal protective equipment (PPE). We show how PPE has become a focal point that may occult the broader issues of using approved toxic products and managing exposure risks in the context of a widely held collective belief that wearing PPE actually protects de facto. Through these objects, the formal and informal, material and immaterial dimensions of toxic risk regulation practices play out. These dimensions must be taken into account in the design of truly effective prevention measures. However, to bring prevention processes out of compensation and technique-based logics – which fail in practice – the invisible and sensitive dimensions that come into play in the development of self-preservation practices need to be documented and valued. The sensitive reading proposed here, by complementing the anthropotechnological and ergotoxicological approaches with an anthropology of the senses and drawing inspiration from an emerging philosophy of the body in dance, seeks to transcend the dualistic and cognitivist boundaries that prevent us from grasping the sensory depth of bodies engaged in activity analysis. In this sense, the use of a choreographic perspective seems relevant not only in the analysis of the technical practices of people in activity but also with a transformative aim, serving as an intermediary object of intervention and design.