Term | Value | Language |
---|---|---|
dc.contributor.advisor | Pulido, Laura | |
dc.contributor.author | Bruno, Tianna | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2021-09-13T19:07:12Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2021-09-13 | |
dc.identifier.uri | https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/26725 | |
dc.description.abstract | This dissertation chronicles both anti-Black environmental injustice and Black sense of place in uninhabitable spaces in the afterlife of slavery. The afterlife of slavery refers to the precarity and devaluation of Black life set in motion by chattel slavery (Hartman 2006; Sharpe 2016). In this research, I examine how the afterlife of slavery takes shape in environmental justice (EJ) communities within the U.S. South. Dialectically, I also examine how Black life, sense of place, and joy persist even within spaces of environmental degradation, high premature death rates, and long histories of anti-Black violence. I conduct this research through a case study of Port Arthur, Texas, a historically Black community nestled in what the US Environmental Protection Agency calls “the largest oil refining network in the world” (USEPA 2010). This project takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining Black geographies, critical physical geography, and EJ to make three critical interventions. First, I position environmental and climate injustice within an afterlife of slavery framework to bring to light the logics and structures that brought anti-Black environmental injustice into being. Secondly, heeding calls within critical physical geography to take seriously the biophysical and social co-constitution of landscapes, I integrate biophysical landscapes into the notion of the afterlife of slavey. I examine the inter-relationship between devaluation and precarity of Black life and the contamination, degradation, and climate vulnerability of the biophysical landscapes in which these lives exist. Lastly, this project promises a key intervention by foregrounding Black relationship to place and sense of place within EJ focused research, which has long emphasized death and degradation to the neglect of Black life and relationship to place. I draw on the afterlife of slavery to highlight the relationship to place and land particularly for Black populations whose ancestors labored in this region that now holds clusters of EJ communities. This project aims to shed new light on the complexity of place within spaces of racial violence by dialectically bringing the precarity of EJ communities into conversation with the life and joy that simultaneously occurs in such spaces. | en_US |
dc.language.iso | en_US | |
dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
dc.rights | All Rights Reserved. | |
dc.subject | Black geographies | en_US |
dc.subject | Black sense of place | en_US |
dc.subject | Climate justice | en_US |
dc.subject | Critical physical geography | en_US |
dc.subject | Environmental justice | en_US |
dc.title | Environmental Injustice and Black Sense of Place in the Social and Biophysical Afterlife of Slavery | |
dc.type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation | |
dc.description.embargo | 2023-08-27 | |
thesis.degree.name | Ph.D. | |
thesis.degree.level | doctoral | |
thesis.degree.discipline | Department of Geography | |
thesis.degree.grantor | University of Oregon |