Black Inheritance of Place in (Un)Inhabitable Spaces
Topics: Black Geographies
, Environmental Justice
, Cultural and Political Ecology
Keywords: Black geographies, Black ecologies, environmental justice, sense of place, inheritance
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 43
Authors:
Tianna Bruno, University of Texas at Austin
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
Abstract
Historicizing EJ enables attention to relationship to place built over time, throughout generations. Specific to the U.S. Gulf Coast, this approach highlights a complex relationship to place and land particularly for Black populations whose ancestors labored in a region that now holds clusters of EJ communities. EJ literature largely focuses on economic constraints to explain why people remain in contaminated areas, but EJ scholars rarely ask what it means for people to leave. That is to say, EJ scholarship has yet to have significant engagement with Black sense of place. I examine Black relationship to place and environment within a Black EJ community along the U.S. Gulf Coast, Port Arthur, Texas. I position relationship to place and environment temporally to ask how it is shaped historically and how it relates to Black futurity. Furthermore, EJ scholarship often emphasizes the death and degradation occurring in EJ communities, to highlight the dangerous conditions in which EJ community members live. Black geographies scholars, however, advise researchers to work against such discourse that essentializes Black spaces to death and decay. I incorporate Black geographies, a field that has long analyzed and theorized Black sense of place, into EJ scholarship to open room for new understandings of how Black community members know and experience place, even with environmental degradation and precarity.
Black Inheritance of Place in (Un)Inhabitable Spaces
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
Description
This abstract is part of a session. Click here to view the session.
| Slides