Waste to energy:

Abstract

If it had been built, the Fairfield Renewable Energy Project would have been the largest trash incinerator in the United States, burning 4,000 tons of waste each day in late‐industrial Baltimore. When it was first proposed, two discourses of renewal coalesced around the project. One was propagated by technocrats who argued incineration should be regulated as a renewable technology. Another emerged among working‐class whites who hoped the plant would reinvigorate their ailing economy. Both discourses hinged on comparisons with the past and maneuvers between futures near and far, gaining ground through subjunctive politics. Recast in this light, both technocratic dreams and local narratives of waste, race, and decline betray a deep ambivalence about the sorts of futures that seem plausible within a geography of “undesirables.” [subjunctive politics, waste, race, renewal, future, uncertainty, environment, Baltimore, United States]

Uncertainty in Motion: Rumors of a Proxy War in Late Industrial Baltimore

“…Many believed students were controlled by “carpetbaggers” such as Nick, their white mentor from a leftist group based a little further north in Baltimore. Beyond this, leaders' mistrust of student activists was also racialized: South Baltimore is a freshly integrated place where many whites code their Black neighbors as “outsiders” by default (Ahmann 2019). This, too, forms part of the atmosphere that envelops this place, where anti‐Blackness constitutes a “total climate” (Sharpe 2016, 105), and where few whites believed that the Black youth leading the campaign had reason to care about the neighborhood or the capacity to organize themselves.…”

“…These are deadly serious forces, and much of my work concerns their role in producing uncertainty about the local atmosphere over a long 200 years and the devastating impact of the same on residents, whose place‐based knowledge gets dismissed as dubious. I also study how locals live, strive, and maneuver in this consequential muddle (Ahmann 2018, 2019, forthcoming). One way they do is through a kind of rumor practice that meets the gravity of life in late industrial environments with narrative agility, even play, bent on orchestrating partial knowledge to local advantage—including in debates about who gets to claim the mantle of the “local,” and who doesn't.…”

From Necrocene to Naíocene—promising pathways toward sustainable agri-food systems

“…Yet this is also an ontological opportunity, after all: all humans are part of global food ecologies, no matter how disconnected we may be made to feel through contemporary global supply chains and unequal burdens of ecological degradation. The omnipresent environmental contamination (Ahmann 2019;Guthman 2011;Udovicki et al 2022) experienced in wealthier and poorer communities alike shows how the Necrocene comes to consume even the wellbeing of the historical beneficiaries of colonial capitalism. Care, truth, and reparation are essential steps forward in the effort to nourish and support the web of life.…”

Carceral Repair

“…That is, the waste that is generated by powerintensive ways of life under late capitalism -whether landfills or unemployed people -comes to itself be framed as something that can produce further power. Waste-to-power projects (Ahmann 2019) and waste generated from power projects (Hecht 2018) are ethnographically rich sites that reveal dynamics of struggle living within political-economic inequalities generated by new energy frontiers.…”