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Abstract

This study examines how living with unsafe and degrading infrastructures leading to lead poisoning in Southern California is an embodied experience mediated by class, race, and late industrialism.

Core Analytical Categories

“Risk”  - a term that is used by multiple actors in my fieldsite; public health officials, environmental scientists, school board members and parents all use this term when referring to lead p

Designating Late Industrialism

This document charts the ways this project develops our understandings of late industrialism, and in turn, how late industrialism, as an analytic, increases our understanding of lead poisoning.

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Andreas_Rebmann

"(Survivors) told us that they were experiencing ongoing “displacement” in the sense that their lives had not returned to normal, even though they were back in their “place of residence.”

"Depression and anxiety disorders were pervasive. Many residents had regular nightmares of waking up in water. They talked about recurring “breakdowns” in which they became overcome with emotion and physically collapsed. A 2007 study showed that 20 percent of New Orleans residents were categorized as having a Katrina-related serious mental illness, and 19 percent showed signs of minimal to mild mental illness (Sastry and VanLandingham 2008; Thomas 2008)."

"Margot, an elderly woman still living in a FEMA trailer next to her destroyed and as yet unrebuilt home, described the problem: 'I haven’t had a mail box in three years, OK. I mean symbolically that’s it right now. I don’t even have a mailbox. You know, if you want to put it in one sentence. I am just tired of not having a mailbox, ya know, because I don’t know where I live.' "