Search

Why is the rate of incarceration in Louisiana so high? How do we critique the way prisons are part of infrastructural solutions to anthropocenic instabilities? As Angela Davis writes, “prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.” One way of imagining and building a vision of an anti-carceral future is practiced in the Solitary Gardens project here in New Orleans: 

The Solitary Gardens are constructed from the byproducts of sugarcane, cotton, tobacco and indigo- the largest chattel slave crops- which we grow on-site, exposing the illusion that slavery was abolished in the United States. The Solitary Gardens utilize the tools of prison abolition, permaculture, contemplative practices, and transformative justice to facilitate exchanges between persons subjected to solitary confinement and volunteer proxies on the “outside.” The beds are “gardened” by prisoners, known as Solitary Gardeners, through written exchanges, growing calendars and design templates. As the garden beds mature, the prison architecture is overpowered by plant life, proving that nature—like hope, love, and imagination—will ultimately triumph over the harm humans impose on ourselves and on the planet.

"Nature" here is constructed in a very particularistic way: as a redemptive force to harness in opposition to the wider oppressive system the architecture of a solitary confinement cell is a part of. It takes a lot of intellectual and political work to construct a counter-hegemonic nature, in other words. Gardeners in this setting strive toward a cultivation of relations antithetical to the isolationist, anti-collective sociality prisons (and in general, a society in which prisons are a permanent feature of crisis resolution) foster.

My interest in NOLA anthropocenics pivots on water, and particularly the ways in which capitalist regimes of value and waste specify, appropriate, and/or externalize forms of water. My research is concerned with water crises more generally, and geographically situated in Flint, Michigan. I thought I could best illustrate these interests with a sampling of photographs from a summer visit to NOLA back in 2017. At the time, four major confederate monuments around the city had just been taken down. For supplemental reading, I'm including an essay from political theorist Adolph Reed Jr. (who grew up in NOLA) that meditates on the long anti-racist struggle that led to this possibility, and flags the wider set of interventions that are urgently required to abolish the landscape of white supremacy. 

Flooded street after heavy rains due to failures of city pumping infrastructure.

A headline from the same week in the local press.

Some statues are gone but other monuments remain (this one is annotated).

A Starbucks in Lakeview remembering Katrina--the line signifies the height of the water at the time.

Reading:

Adolph Reed Jr., “Monumental Rubbish” https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/06/25/monumental-rubbish-statues-torn-down-what-next-new-orleans

P.S. In case the photos don't show up in the post I'm attaching them in a PDF document as well! 

"Less than a penny of every dollar goes directly to a Haitian organization."

"So as Haiti approaches the fifth anniversary of its cholera epidemic later this year, the main hope for eradication rests on political and legal pressure on the U.N. to come up with the money."

The report is an NGO report; MSF has a page for its reports on its website.

News coverage mostly is focused on how its the first college of its kind to offer degrees specifically tailored to homeland security and emergency preparedness, and one article highlighted some of the first to graduate with a minor from the college.

http://www.lohud.com/story/news/education/2016/05/15/homeland-security-…

With this data, health care professionals can expect that former inmates would be more likely to have certain diseases (tuberculosis, HIV, hepatitis C) and mental illness (drug dependence/ abuse, PTSD, anxiety), and likely didn't get treated while in prison.   

The author is Adriana Petryna, who is an anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology at University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the "public and private forms of scientific knowledge production, as well as on the role of science and technology in public policy". Her work doesn't specifically focus on emergency response, but more on the political and scientific developments that occur in a country after a disaster.

The methods used to produce the arguments in the article were ethnographic research, interviews with dozens of subjects suffering from epilepsy or similar disorder from several countries, and analysis of the subjects' narratives from psychological and anthropological viewpoints.  

The author is Sonja D. Schmid, an associate professor at Virginia Tech in the Department of Science and Technology in Society. She specializes in STS (science, tech, and society) analysis, nuclear industries, and energy policies. In respect to emergency response, Schmid is able to use her knowledge of previous disasters, current energy technologies, and societal influences to address what we need nationally/ internationally for how we should respond to emergencies. The ability to identify the multifaceted levels of what causes disasters is important to properly responding to them- by changing technologies, training and education of communities, and changing energy policies to avoid and handle more disaster.

Publications relevant to the DSTS Network: "Evacuation from a nuclear disaster" (http://www.jstor.org/stable/214548?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents), "A comparative institutional analysis of the Fukushima nuclear disaster: Lessons and policy implications" (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421512009433)

Research focusing on nuclear waste management, developments for safer nuclear energy and studies of the nuclear arms race are also relevant to DSTS Network.