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Elena Sobrino: anti-carceral anthropocenics

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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.

Elena Sobrino: toxic capitalism

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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! 

The referenced media source is missing and needs to be re-embedded.

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Andreas_Rebmann
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Readers, however, often used the books for a different purpose:
identifying depression. Regularly, I received — and still receive — phone calls: “My
husband is just like — ” one or another figure from a clinical example.

HERE is where I want to venture a radical statement about the worth of
anecdote. Beyond its roles as illustration, affirmation, hypothesis­builder and lowlevel
guidance for practice, storytelling can act as a modest counterbalance to a
straitened understanding of evidence.

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Andreas_Rebmann
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The article emphasizes the need for a disaster-preparedness plan, with pre-existing infrastructure to address trauma and mass casualty management, as well as long-term sources of clean water and waste disposal. Assured primary healthcare and wide-spread vaccination usage help with these efforts.

Post-disaster, there will need to be intervention to ensure that these standards are being met, as well as surveillance for communicable diseases.

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Andreas_Rebmann
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The narrative is maintained through both very real, detailed descriptions of actions taken for both specific cases and the handling of large groups of patients. It also goes into some lesser known events of 9/11, such as the triage camps being destroyed by the collaspe of the towers and how the situation evolved throughout the two crashes and collaspes that day. It appeals to the emotion of the viewer in many ways. It discusses the incrediable physical and psychological damage that the victims sustained during the disaster. It then handled the emotional trauma and determination that the first responders and doctors had to deal with when they saw their gore and chaos of their city all around them while needing to maintain their professionality and ability to care for their pateints. It also later in the film talked about the first responders who lost their lives in their dedication to save others, with direct emotional appeal through the portayal of one first responder who lost a long time friend becoming choked up remembering his fallen friend once again.