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"How do people live in a time after promises of progress have revealed themselves to be empty? In Futures after Progress, anthropologist Chloe Ahmann examines the grave, lethal threat posed by long-term air pollution in Baltimore, MD. Focusing on the industrialized community of Curtis Bay-ranked first in the country for air pollutants released from stationary sources-she examines competing visions of the future and the severe human toll they can take. Examining the rifts between white and Black communities, advocates of big industry and environmental activists, and older and younger generations, Ahmann shows how this community has become a battleground in which lives lost to pollution are seen by some as a regrettable side effect on the road to economic renewal. A rigorous, moving study of environmental risk and disaster, this book offers deep insights for our current condition and the possibility of a postindustrial world"--
How films help us understand the inevitable death of Earth and humanity Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction brings cinema studies, queer theory, and psychoanalysis into novel configuration around the concept of negative life, a sundering of human and nonhuman relations. Engaging a philosophical and cinematic corpus that rejects the pastoralism of “entanglement” or “enmeshment,” Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay counter ecocritical pieties and cut a new path for theory. They examine films by Julian Pölsler, Kelly Reichardt, Lee Isaac Chung, Mahesh Mathai, Paul Schrader, and others that exemplify the existential contradictions currently intensifying amid the sixth mass extinction. Each case study testifies formally and thematically to negative life as a structural condition of thought and film. Together, the cases reveal the unlivable dimension of life and art, where form, desire, and nonbelonging tarry with the future-oriented promise of ecostudies—where all that lives connects. Negative Life militates against this promise, showing that faith in connection is a dead end.
"Toxic City examines the politics of environmental repair and urban redevelopment in a historically segregated neighborhood of San Francisco. The book argues that environmental racism is part of a broad history of harm linked to slavery and its afterlives, and that environmental justice can be considered within a larger project of reparations. The book also details how, over many decades, residents have argued that toxic cleanup and urban redevelopment ought to be a socially, economically, and ecologically reparative process that supports the self-determination of Black residents"--
“Let this book immerse you in the many worlds of environmental justice.”—Naomi Klein We are living in a precarious environmental and political moment. In the United States and in the world, environmental injustices have manifested across racial and class divides in devastatingly disproportionate ways. What does this moment of danger mean for the environment and for justice? What can we learn from environmental justice struggles? Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger examines mobilizations and movements, from protests at Standing Rock to activism in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Environmental justice movements fight, survive, love, and create in the face of violence that challenges the conditions of life itself. Exploring dispossession, deregulation, privatization, and inequality, this book is the essential primer on environmental justice, packed with cautiously hopeful stories for the future.
"Where Cloud is Ground offers an ethnography of the international data storage industry, and an inquiry into the relationship between data and place. Based in Iceland, which is fast becoming a hot spot for data centers -- facilities where large quantities of data is processed and stored -- the book traces the fraught work of siting data's material manifestations in relation to landforms and earth processes, local politics, national narratives, and still-open questions of spatial justice and sovereignty. Doing so, it unsettles techno-utopian ideals of connectivity and offers a window into what it means to live with our data, in a place where more and more data now lives"--
"AUTHOR'S NOTE: This book is unconventional. A self-conscious experiment in form that draws together two vernaculars: anthropological thought and the pop culture of my youth. It is a fraught exercise. I write as a White guy about angst and alienation in the privileged spaces of anthropology and higher education. I appreciate the irony. I hope nonetheless that my experiences with and critical perspectives on social conventions, the culture of liberalism, and ableism in academia might be useful. I seek to expand possibilities of anthropological representation while challenging epistemological, aesthetic, and professional norms in my discipline. It bothers me that anthropology can be so sanctim...
A vital reckoning with how we understand the basic categories of cultural expression in the digital era Digital and social media have transformed how much and how fast we communicate, but they have also altered the palette of expressive strategies: the cultural forms that shape how citizens, activists, and artists speak and interact. Most familiar among these strategies are storytelling and representation. In A Theory of Assembly, Kyle Parry argues that one of the most powerful and pervasive cultural forms in the digital era is assembly. Whether as subtle photographic sequences, satirical Venn diagrams, or networked archives, projects based in assembly do not so much narrate or represent the...
We are living through a world-rattling ecological inflection point, with an unprecedented consensus that capitalism is leading humanity into a social and ecological catastrophe and that everything needs to change, and fast. Thankfully, radical environmental movements have forced the question of “system change” to the centre of the political agenda to make way for a just and livable world. Insurgent Ecologies takes readers on an inspiring journey across key sites of ecological crisis and contestation, showing how revolutionary politics can emerge from the convergences between place-based, often disconnected struggles. These engaging essays speak to longstanding debates in political ecolog...
The frontiers of extraction are expanding rapidly, driven by a growing demand for minerals and metals that is often motivated by sustainability considerations. Two volumes of International Development Policy are dedicated to the paradoxes and futures of green extractivism, with analyses of experiences from five continents. In this, the first of these two volumes, 16 authors offer a critical and nuanced understanding of the social, cultural and political dimensions of extraction. The experiences of communities, indigenous peoples and workers in extractive contexts are deeply shaped by narratives, imaginaries and the complexity of social contexts. These dimensions are crucial to making extraction possible and to sustaining its expansion, but also to identifying possibilities for resistance, and to paving the way for alternative, post-extractive economies. This volume is accompanied by IDP 16, The Afterlives of Extraction: Alternatives and Sustainable Futures.