Category Archives: Faculty Fellows Seminar

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
Faculty Fellows Seminar

Craig Campbell: Anthropocene Greetings

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On Thursday, September 2, Craig Campbell shared his project, “Anthropocene Greetings,” with the Faculty Fellows. Campbell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and directs the Intermedia Workshop at UT Austin. He is also part of the collaborative Bureau for Experimental Ethnography.

“Birthday (humorous);” “Anniversary (special);” “Graduation (money holder); “Any Occasion (blank).” Most of us have perused the rows of greeting cards at a drugstore or Target, looking for an appropriate sentiment to send to a nephew who is getting married, or a far-away friend celebrating a birthday.  But what is a greeting card, really, and what does it do? What sorts of social relations does it make and sustain? Campbell’s project, “Anthropocene Greetings,” seeks to explore the possibilities offered by creating and sharing greetings that address climate catastrophe.

Campbell presented from inside the Design Lab in the campus Fine Arts Building. He introduced the Fellows to the Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection, which include the 19th Century typefaces he has used to make a variety of anthropocene greeting cards.

Campbell describes  Anthropocene Greetings as a project of research-creation, a methodology that considers the place of making in the practice of research. Citing the work of Erin Manning and Brian Massumi in Thought in the Act and Natalie Loveless in How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, he explained that research-creation permits movement between disciplinary territories and asks the question, “what counts as research?”

Campbell walked the Fellows through the process of creating a letterpress print, showing them the Vandercook press used to print the cards. He emphasized the embodied and sensory nature of the printmaking process: the ways in which the printmaker becomes related to the machine as it forces certain postures or bodily behaviors, the squelch of the ink as it is expressed. The process forces the maker to slow down. The type must be set, the paper cannot be rushed through the press, the ink must dry between each color application. For Campbell, the slowness of the process allows for different kinds of thinking.

Greeting cards serve as a form of “human infrastructure,” helping us to send words of condolence or celebration while alleviating the burden of coming up with them on our own. They are “gestures of concern” (Ingraham 2020) that promote shared awareness and seek to create connection. Sending a card permits us to discharge an obligation with minimal effort and, perhaps, minimal risk. Fellows discussed what sorts of accountability and care greeting cards in general, and Campbell’s Anthropocene greetings in particular, offer.

The climate crisis prompts us to question the effectiveness of individual acts when confronting complicated and multi-pronged problems. Loveless suggests that research-creation “can persuade us to care and to care differently” (2019: 107). Making and sharing Anthropocene greetings provides a means to communicate concerns about climate change, a small way to shore up the world, a minor gesture that reminds “us” that we’re all in this together, though we may not experience it in the same way. Perhaps expressing care through the template of a card creates more mental and emotional space for other, more large-scale, efforts and affects.

The climate crisis prompts us to question the effectiveness of individual acts when confronting its complicated and multi-pronged  problems. Loveless suggests that research-creation “can persuade us to care and to care differently” (2019: 107). Making and sharing   anthropocene greetings provides a means to communicate concerns about climate change, a small way to shore up the world, a minor gesture that reminds “us” that we’re all in this together. Perhaps expressing care through the template of a card creates more mental and emotional space for other, more large-scale, efforts.

Fellows questioned whether the form of the greeting card works across different social and cultural contexts, citing communities in which cards are not part of a shared affective vocabulary. They also explored “touch” as both a physical form of, and a metaphor for, care: keeping in touch, a touching message, feeling moved by a message. What about moments when touch and closeness are undesirable?  Liberal ideals of community and commons stress conviviality, but Covid puts pressure on those ideals.  If the cards are about creating social relations, what sorts of relations are created when they are sent to those who deny climate change? Perhaps the cards communicate dissent, or serve as provocations.

The question of access also surfaced. Printmaking requires access to materials and equipment.  Additionally, there are many kinds of print cultures. What are the possibilities for meeting communities on their own terms? How does literacy work into the the question of affect? Can communities that don’t operate in that mode participate in the project? What would broadening the typefaces used in the cards imply?

Campbell acknowledges the limitations of the form, while positing it as a site of possibility. Non-literate people live among literate people; cards are often read aloud or become prompts for narratives, like photos in albums. Once the card is made and sent, it is in the hands of someone who can alter it. The cards provide a low-stakes invitation to play even if the maker or recipient is not personally familiar with the custom. Future plans include workshops to be hosted in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada with Cree participants, and at Marfa Community Print in West Texas. Working with Cree syllabics might require making a new typeface, while the Marfa site could allow for access to Spanish language typefaces.

Creating anthropocene greetings provides an opportunity for conviviality that pushes against and extends beyond congeniality and what  Teju Cole, writing in The Atlantic,  calls the “sentimental need to ‘make a difference'” (2012) that undergirds many white Western responses to social injustices. A greeting card cannot halt climate disaster, but its creation and dissemination can be part of efforts to sustain community.  It’s an imperfect response to an impossible situations. As Campbell said in closing, everyday materials present much with which to work.

 

 

 

 

Faculty Fellows Seminar

Neil Blumofe: “Shemittah (Sabbatical Year): the remission of debt, manumission, and the concept of home in relationship to the current disruptions and climate crisis in our world”

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The Fall 2021 Faculty Fellows met for the first time on Thursday, August 26, led by Rabbi Neil Blumofe, our Community Fellow. Blumofe leads Congregation Agudas Achim, a synagogue in Austin. He presented the concept of “shemittah,” a sabbatical year, a time at which routine is disrupted and the land is allowed to rest. His project—which he is approaching as a spiritual autobiography—seeks to consider shemittah within the framework of land ethics and conservation. His reflections come just before the celebration of the Jewish New Year of 5782, a shemittah year which begins on the evening of September 6th.

Blumofe sees the sabbatical year as a way to disrupt routine and as a way to give poise. He began the session by sharing photos from a recent trip he made to the western USA: open landscapes populated by bison; mountains; and glacier lakes. The two final photos showed sites that mark depletion and the destruction of land, the Minuteman National Historic Site and the Sanford Underground Research Facility, located in an abandoned gold mine. He closed the introduction with song and an invitation to contemplation taken from Rav Kook quote found  in David Seidenberg’s essay on Jewish ecological thought:

“Contemplate the wonders of Creation, the divine dimension of their being, not as a dim configuration that is presented to you from the distance but as the reality in which you live. Know yourself and your world . . .”

Blumofe explained that shemittah is mentioned three times in the Hebrew Bible. Historically, it entailed a pause in the cultivation of land; remission of debt; and the release of enslaved and indentured persons.  The shemittah year resets the economy. Private property ceases to exist: plants and animals are given reign over land, and people may access it without restriction. Those in debt are amnestied.

Fellows explored what it means for land to rest. For what purpose?  Is it rested because of diminished productivity, so it can produce later?  Is it rested so that it may return to some previous state? If there are multiple users of the land, who decides when it should rest? What is the vision for the land after its rest period, and who determines that?

The discussion included different ways that humans interpret land at rest.  Human management of land often seeks to restore it to a previous state. Restoration implies modifications of some kind; perhaps the soil is amended, or trees are planted. The goal of restoration is to make the land function as humans think it should. Another way of “resting” land is through preservation, setting it aside and allowing nature to have its way.

Fellows suggested a third term: remediation.  Remediation is not a return to pristine state. Whereas restoration is an erasure of history, remediation doesn’t pretend to erase history. It leaves us with something less than pristine. It holds the trace of history and is a reminder of that.

Many classic—and some contemporary— environmentalist and conservationist texts ignore or idealize the perspectives of indigenous and other marginalized peoples and consign them to the past. Fellows grappled with how to read such works. How are these texts considered  historically and how do those conversations reverberate with current conversations?  How do we think about manumission during movements of abolition? What is the place of reparations?

For Blumofe,  the shemittah year provides sanctuary and allows a lessening of the hold of commodification. He understands it as a spiritual model, a perspective that is more than ours, regardless of privilege. To illustrate this, he turned to two texts, Leviticus 25:2 from the Torah, and a 2nd century commentary on that passage. The passage from Leviticus describes Moses on Mt. Sinai, receiving a message from the divine: “the land shall observe a sabbath, a sabbath of the divine.” The commentary focuses on why the concept of the sabbatical year is juxtaposed with Sinai.

Blumofe explained that the commentary asks, what does it mean to speak from a place that is Mount Sinai? It’s aspirational: Sinai is a place where everyone together was able to receive a revelation of hope and aspiration.  For Blumofe, shemittah is a way of thinking about reordering, a way to look at the world and find a way through. The  juxtaposition gives us a sense of how to live in the world, something to work in our everyday lives. We can also keep it ahead of us. We may not experience the shemittah, or know whose land it is, or even who we are, but we can move forward. The shemittah doesn’t just give you rest from exhaustion, it allows you to do the work.

 

 

Sinai mountains with a yellow. pink. and purple sky
The Sinai Mountains, photo by Mohammed Moussa, through Wikimedia Commons
Faculty Fellows Seminar

Heather Houser: “Affiliating Reproductive and Climate Justice.”

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Dr. Heather Houser, associate professor in the Department of English, led the February 11 session of the Faculty Fellows Seminar. Houser presented a new project she is developing, an exploration of the challenges and the possibilities of including reproduction as part of the response to climate crisis.

Influenced by her work as part of an interdisciplinary team at Planet Texas 2050 and the research and writing of her monographs Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction (2014) and Infowhelm: Environmental Art and Literature in the Age of Data (2020), Houser seeks to write outside of the frame of a traditional academic monograph. Both literary writing and visual art that incorporate scientific information open space for artists to question western epistemologies and to entangle them with other knowledges, a prospect that she finds stimulating and challenging.  Examples of  writing she finds compelling include Angela Saini’s Superior: The Return of Race Science (2019) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), by Isabel Wilkerson. She imagines writing shorter, more personal pieces, such as the work of Roxane Gay and Elizabeth Kolbert.

In this initial exploratory stage, she wishes to get a sense of how conversations around family, reproduction, and climate develop. She began her inquiries with a set of questions: what are the frameworks within which climate conversations happen? What  ideas galvanize those conversations, and what  ideas or themes are taboo?

Houser decided on the term “affiliation” to link her areas of inquiry both to avoid prescriptive framings and to deflect the tendency to subordinate one form of justice to the other.  The point is to think of reproductive justice and environmental justice together. For her, affiliation gets at creating conditions for thriving, one of the central concerns of the reproductive justice movement.

Both the climate justice and the reproductive justice movements have thorny and complicated racial histories. Houser intends her work to bring a critique of white dominance to both. At her current stage of inquiry,  she finds the critiques provided by the history of Black feminism and the Black women’s health movement most valuable, citing works such as  Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present for their engagement with racial histories of science in the USA. She’s interested in thinking about particular ideas of justice, and what justice means in different communities. The project requires self-reflection and awareness of her own positionality as she works in and with traditions of thought, advocacy, and expression without being appropriative.

Houser also directs attention to the concept of “choice.” A key point for the reproductive justice movement is the ability to have—or not have— children according to one’s own terms. Her initial impression is that  “childfree” is a position predominately held, or more publicly owned and capitalized upon, by white women. However, under conditions of racial injustice and health inequities, the choices of some are limited or completely removed: communities of color are disproportionately affected by environmental toxins that disrupt or impair human reproduction, and are also targeted by racist policies that pathologize certain family structures and seek to control reproduction, including through forced sterilizations.

Fellows suggested several avenues for further exploration. One possible trajectory is to question the relationships between justice and choice. How does justice differ from choice?  Is justice about making an individual choice with knowledge of the structures that shape that choice?  What would it mean to reframe the notion of self-determination in a collective sense?  The work of Eve Tuck proposes justice as an important, but limited, meeting place. Justice works within the confines of the state. It provides a space for movement building and advocacy, but the end goal of these movements is not necessarily redress within the state.

Another approach is to think along the lines of labor and care as they apply to reproduction and sustainability. What are the ideas of family and community that make care more or less sustainable? What are other versions of family? Both Silvia Federici and Maria Mies provide accounts that reconsider domestic and family labor. Perhaps different communities of care and support open new possibilities for reproductive justice and environmental justice and sustainability.