The I-10 is a peculiar beast. Its body stretches from coast to coast, it cuts through swamps and deserts, sometimes criss-crosses mountains and sometimes lies flat on its belly, while thousands of vehicles crawl upon its back. If it were not for the metaphor, however, it would be hard to think of it as a […]
Aspiring Accountable Filmmakers
In light of our discussions last week about the politics of ethnographically and analytically accounting for resonance and lineal association across various kinds of phenomena encountered in “the field,” “the literature” and/or in “the archive,” I noticed several relevant threads that also animate the political stakes of audio-visual representation in film. Similar to how physically […]
Toxic Film
A lot of the readings we’re doing for this class touch on aesthetics – not in the classical sense where “aesthetics” equals the philosophical study of beauty and its qualities, but rather in the sense of contemporary philosophy and art history where it comes to signify the experiential perception of the world via one’s senses. […]
Narrating Neighborhoods
I’m signed up to do a Neighborhood Biography for the digital storytelling project. Even though I don’t know what neighborhood I’ll be working in/with just yet, I do have some reflections on how I’ve come to know about Houston’s neighborhoods and the way they are storied already. As I become more situated, oriented, and familiar […]
Birds as Sentinels for Environmental Harm
I’m really excited that I’m going to be doing the Toxicity 101 project because it’s a great opportunity for me to meld the objectives of this course with my own academic interests. My dissertation project is taking a lot of interesting twists and turns at the moment, the most recent of which has brought me […]
Writing the Toxic Implosion
What object or process can we implode to understand “how is this toxic artefact in the world” and vice versa? Upon moving to Houston last year, I knew that some communities more than others reside in what are called “sacrifice zones” (Lerner 2010), where chemical toxicity disproportionately flows and seeps into the environments and bodies […]