Fieldnote May 2 2023 - 1:18pm
In this visit, we were focused on stringing seashells onto the wooden branches as art pieces for the exhibition.
In this visit, we were focused on stringing seashells onto the wooden branches as art pieces for the exhibition.
In this visit, I spent most of my time talking to an ah ma from my weekly group.
We started our time at Naluwan with some morning dance moves to warm up our bodies. It was pleasant to see the elders actively participating in the exercise.
For this visit, Juanjuan and I were grouped with five grandmothers, three from the previous visit and two new grandmothers due to the absence of our classmates.
Driving through the small alley of the place where the Amis live felt odd as the modern view on my left - wind turbines, bridges, was a vast contrast from the view on my right which saw village-lik
World War II's Manhattan Project required the refinement of massive amounts of uranium, and St. Louis-based Mallinckrodt Chemical Works took on the job.
Thinking through this article and Vermeylen's, something we might consider in ATX is how we conceptualize community itself. It is so easy in EJ-contexts to make communities our object of study and analysis, which can erase identities and exclusions within them...
How is ecological harm and gentrification experienced by LGBTQ people in Austin? Women? Etcetera?
What is the energy sector's relationship to racial capitalism? How is its current configuration shaped by legacies of settler colonialism, state bureaucracy, and corporate investment?
Environmental justice narratives in the U.S. often fall into "sacrifice zone" narratives that universalize experiences on the community-level, reproducing specifically bounded narratives about American lives and livelihoods, relationships to nature and capital, and the kinds of knowledge and authority that matter. Vermeylen's article disrupts this idea, rightfully arguing that environmental justice requires a more upfront confrontation with the socio-historical causes of oppression brought about by coloniality, as well as the fact that we need to question the righteousness of EJ discourses that rely on white settler logics.
For the Austin Field Campus, how can we bring attention to Anglo-American settler colonialism in our approaches to EJ and gentrification? And thinking back to the NOLA Field Campus, what Texas histories should we be drawing from to understand energy transitions in the city?
A statue is built in the middle of the walkway that separates the river and the land that the Amis lives on.