Tag Archives: community organizing

Faculty Fellows Seminar

Katherine Lieberknecht: Home is where your heart is: climate change, buyout programs, and land reuse

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Katherine Lieberknecht, Assistant Professor of Community and Regional Planning  in the School of Architecture, led the Thursday, September 9 meeting of the Fellows Seminar.  Lieberknecht’s work focuses on environmental planning centered in equity. The project she presented to the Fellows examines the practice of property buyouts of climate-impacted residential areas.

Typically initiated by local governments, buyout programs pay residents of areas subject to climate events of increased intensity and frequency to relocate. The process usually focuses on the purchase of the land; residents have little or no say in how the buyouts are carried out or what happens to the land after they leave. To frame the conversation, Lieberknecht offered examples of buyout processes, including three located in Texas: the Kashmere Gardens neighborhood in Houston, and two sites in the Austin area, the Williamson Creek and Onion Creek neighborhoods.

Kashmere Gardens is a historically Black community wedged in between two railroad lines, developed under racist land use and zoning policies that allowed inadequate infrastructure and increased exposure to pollution. Affected by proximity to multiple brownfields (former industrial or commercial sites with a high probability of being contaminated), the community underwent a 25-year buyout process in which they had little input.

The Austin area neighborhoods were constructed based on faulty flood plain maps drawn up in the 1970s; homes should not have been built in the areas the neighborhoods occupied. The decision to offer buyouts came after repeated catastrophic flooding. Buyout plans for the Austin neighborhoods made an effort to incorporate the perspectives and views of people who accepted buyouts and those who stayed. However, decision-making remained siloed, and largely out of the hands of residents.

Lieberknecht’s project asks whether climate buyouts can be structured differently. Many times, buyouts occur after traumatic community events, such as catastrophic floods that include loss of life and extensive property damage and loss. Is there a way to consider the emotional ties people feel to community and land? Can the perspectives of former residents be taken into account when the land is repurposed? Is it even possible to include emotion and trauma in planning processes?  She asked the Fellows to use their own disciplinary lenses to critique what is from a planning perspective uncomplicated, but very complex from a human perspective.

Buyouts often occur in neighborhoods that, like Kashmere Gardens, are already marginal, doubly victimizing the residents. Fellows noted resonances with the relocations of Indigenous peoples. Coastal Indigenous communities in Alaska and Louisiana have been among the first to participate in “just processes” as part of climate-related relocation. Intended for groups that wish to move as a unit, this takes into consideration non-real estate values that go along with homes, such as attachment to bioregion and emotional and spiritual ties to land and people. Efforts to keep community together make an already slow process even slower.

The Louisiana communities received federal money to relocate through FEMA, but have yet to find a suitable location. The climate-related change affecting the Alaskan villages is erosion, which FEMA does not recognize as a disaster, disqualifying them for federal funds. Even relocations designed with social justice in mind can repeat painful histories. The coastal communities in Louisiana are all descendants of tribes forced to move during the Trail of Tears; the Alaskan communities were traditionally migratory groups forced into settlements.

Fellows considered the various ways the processes Lieberknecht described are named: climate retreat, migration, displacement, relocation, destruction, buy-out, resettlement, rehoming, eviction, “climigration.” She acknowledged the difficulty in finding adequate terms. Each word carries different connotations. For example, “climate retreat” invokes the notion of military or tactical defeat, and can provoke shame. The term “community” can also be contested. Who and what defines “the community” when planners and others seek input?

Struggles with language often point to the structural violence that shapes the impacts of climate change on neighborhoods, and language itself can do further violence. Lieberknecht currently works in Dove Springs, one of the neighborhoods affected by multiple Onion Creek floods. Her Dove Springs community partners don’t like the word “resilience.” To them, it implies individual responsibility for helping themselves and avoids assigning the city a role. They prefer “response” and “responsibility,” which gives them agency and the city to responsibility.

Accounting for affect—love of place and love of community—as a public policy and planning issue provides a way to address issues of belonging and disempowerment. “Retreat” can also imply moving towards something, a contemplative state before undertaking an action. Are there ways of looking at climate retreat as the possibility for rethinking larger questions around expertise and consultation? Can these conversations about dispossession shift from simply managing or mitigating harm to opportunities for challenging the status quo of property relations and perhaps discussing reparations?

Lieberknecht recognizes buyouts as an opportunity to rewrite the ways we conceptualize private property. Planners in the United States work within a system designed to uphold individual rights. Rethinking buyouts requires engaging with the complexity and legacy of private property in the United States, wrestling with how property was allocated and value capped because of segregation. She pointed to Austin’s 1928 master plan, which forcibly segregated the city along the east/west divide. In parts of Texas and many other states, no one holds clear title to land. This disproportionately affects communities of color.

Fellows asked how to undertake community-centered design without forcing people to repeat the traumas of dispossession and loss. How is damage documented and who has access to that information? Lieberknecht observed that sharing “your story” is like a tax residents must pay in order to receive city assistance. Perhaps there are ways to shift how stories are shared: a listening process in which everyone is listening to one another, rather than the planners listening and community members sharing stories.

Uncertainty about the fate of places that they valued also contributes to the distress of displaced residents. Onion Creek residents had no input into the city’s plans for their former homes post-buyout. The city combined the purchased land with land it already held to create Onion Creek Metropolitan Park. Remnants of its former use appear in photographs Lieberknecht shared with the Fellows: bits of sidewalk, lampposts, and glimpses of homes belonging to the few residents who refused the buyouts. Its indeterminacy called to mind what Marc Augé (2009) describes as “non-places,” interstitial spaces that offer no opportunity for connection with either other people or land.

Transitional justice surfaced as a possible path to more just resolutions. Originally conceived as means to address large-scale human rights abuses, it offers several options that can be adapted to a smaller scale. Compensation is one form of indemnification, but there are other options: truth reports, memorials, public recognition of people and places ravaged by environmental disasters. Lieberknecht agreed that this framework was helpful. New forms of engagement and amplified understandings of value hold promise for more equitable outcomes as more communities face the realities of climate-based relocation.

Onion Creek Metropolitan Park, 2019 City of Austin photo
Controversy & Conversation

Controversy and Conversation Resources: “The Apple Pushers”

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The April 1 meeting of “Controversy and Conversation” discussed issues raised by the film “The Apple Pushers,” a documentary featuring New York City’s Green Carts Program, an initiative intended to bring greater access to fresh fruits and vegetables to neighborhoods with little opportunity to purchase fresh produce.

HI’s program coordinator, Dr. Melissa Biggs, a food studies scholar, began the discussion. While the film used the terms “food desert” and “food swamp” to describe the neighborhoods served by the Green Carts, she suggested the concept of “food apartheid.” Introduced by activist Karen Washington, “food apartheid” refers to the systems of economic inequality and racial and environmental injustice that permeate our food system.  Biggs asked participants to consider perspectives critical of the “obesity epidemic” framework. The inequities that create food apartheid  contribute to health problems of many kinds.

The introduction served as a starting point for a conversation that touched on the food ecosystem of Austin, changes in shopping and eating due to the COVID 19 epidemic, and food insecurity in rural areas and on college campuses. Zach Shlachter, one of our Austin Public Library partners, described his work with the Eating Apart Together Initiative, a city-sponsored program that came together during the pandemic to help feed unhoused people.

Lucas Alvarez, also of the APL, compiled a list of resources available through APL for those who would like to explore these topics further: APL Resource List “The Apple Pushers”

Below are other resources mentioned during the discussion

City of Austin Food Resources:

Some Local Food Organizations

Austin-Focused Readings and Resources

UT Campus Resources and Initiatives

Readings on Food Justice and Food Systems

Faculty Fellows Seminar

Soldiers, Kings, and the Ethics of Ethnography

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By Sarah Schuster, HI Graduate Research Assistant

On October 24 the Faculty Fellows seminar was led by Jason De León, Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of the prizewinning book, The Land of Open Graves. Previous to the seminar, Dr. de Leon gave a Distinguished Visiting Lecture on his work titled “Soldiers and Kings: A Photoethnography of Human Smuggling Across Mexico,” covering research for an upcoming book and a range of topics including masculinity, representation, radical reflexivity and anxiety, and the ethics of ethnography. 

Dr. De León began the seminar with an introduction to his evolving research methodology, beginning with his early career as a Mesoamerican archeologist studying volcanic glass tools. While working in archeological excavations, De León became interested in the narratives and stories of the workmen digging alongside archeologists, including stories of the border and migration. De León’s work evolved into documenting material culture around the border, particularly in the Arizona desert, taking stock of material goods people take to cross the border, and noting what is left behind in the journey or in makeshift “rest stops.”  Having archived 8,000 different objects at UCLA, De León’s work developed into the Undocumented Migrant Project, a multidisciplinary research project that includes his most recent artistic collaboration, Hostile Terrain 94. This latest project is a participatory installation composed of roughly 3,200 handwritten toe tags representing migrants who have died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert between the mid-1990s and 2019. De León noted that his most recent book project will further explore issues at the border, focusing on smuggling and smugglers. 

Fellows questioned De León’s stated uneasiness with both ethnography and exhibition, which he had expanded on during his introduction. He admitted that though he currently views the exhibition and museum space as a place of potential experimentation, he initially worried that museum spaces presented too neat of a narrative, a problem he similarly faced in anthropology. Additionally, he wanted to avoid fetishizing the objects he archived, or setting migrants at a remove from the curator or audience. Yet he noted that the art space provides an opportunity for people to be made uncomfortable, or to be moved, allowing De León more freedom to craft a specific message or statement than in a written narrative. 

Fellows additionally interrogated De León’s depiction of smugglers, namely, how he would avoid either slipping into stereotyping or valorizing his subjects. De León stated that his aim is to undermine the typical narratives of smugglers made by the U.S. federal government and border patrol, presenting smugglers  as people who have done bad–even terrible–things, but also as people responding to a complex set of circumstances, from economic hardship to labor pull to interventionist policies on the part of the U.S. itself. He discussed the issues attendant on choosing to craft this book as one for a more general audience, noting that he wanted to write a book that would have the impact of fiction with the theoretical heft of academic ethnography. Fellows remarked on the clarity and compelling quality of his work, and the seminar closed with anticipation for his book and exhibition (which may be mounted in Austin–stay tuned!). 

Faculty Fellows Seminar

Who Can Tell What Story?: Ethical Concerns in Theatre Education

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By Sarah Schuster, HI Graduate Research Assistant

Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Department of Theatre and Dance Dr. Sara Simons led the Faculty Fellows seminar held October 4th, beginning with a simple question: who can tell what story? As an educator of future theatre teachers, Dr. Simons noted that her interest in investigating the classroom came from both theoretical and practical concerns. For Simons’ students, the ethics of who can best present a story and whether stories can be told across identity markers quickly become issues of importance in high school theater classrooms. Simons’ students value exposing their own future students to plays and stories from a diverse range of writers and voices, yet many also question how to teach such perspectives. But such conversations are not limited to theatre education, as many Fellows noted.

Simons led the seminar through a series of kinesthetic exercises, many of which she teaches in her own classroom. She began with exercises adapted from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed canon, asking Fellows to follow a series of commands (walk, stop, jump, say your name), then to reverse those commands–to walk when Simons told the group to stop, to jump when Simons asked the group to state their names, and so on. The Fellows debriefed after the activity, noting the activity established new meanings and rules, forcing each of the participants to think before they acted. Simons framed this activity as a way for her to teach students the process of unlearning their assumptions, beliefs, and automatic responses–something, she noted, that is not only continual, but often bumpy.

Simons asked the group frequently to describe what they achieved in the activity, providing the participants an opportunity to reflect on their teaching as well as on their assumptions around teaching texts from authors of different backgrounds from their students (or their own), among other things. Simons noted that theatre education frequently positions theatre as both “a mirror and a window,” representing both the audience’s experiences and experiences that may never have had. But that view of theatre can be complicated by issues of who is permitted to tell stories of marginalized people, and who is represented in theatre as a whole.

Simons instructed Fellows to assemble into small groups to discuss various hypothetical scenarios around storytelling, authenticity, and representation. Fellows debriefed on the assignment as a group, discussing the ethics of writing or teaching stories from different societal positions and perspectives. Many Fellows noted that academic work in a variety of fields involves working in communities outside of their own, requiring researchers to consider how they are accountable to the communities they write about and what materials they need to elucidate or contextualize. Participants also discussed considerations of audience. In theatre, Simons noted, directors and producers frequently need to consider who the show is for, and whether they intend to expand the audience’s horizons or depict the audience’s own lives–the mirror, or the window. Fellows concluded that academics, writers, and others in creative professions often have to make risky moves to promote empathy in their audience, or in their students. Thus, an understanding of the power dynamics at work–in a piece, a production, or in culture broadly–are essential to teaching theatre, and to teaching and writing as a whole.

The seminar closed with each participant stating their final, one word summation of the discussion, providing each Fellow an opportunity to reflect on what they took from the session. Answers ranged widely, but many stated words like authenticity, empathy, context, and other broad topics, making connections to the concerns of past seminars.