The archive is hosted on the Disaster STS Network. The PECE team provides technical services and assistance.
Right now, the collections in this archive are organized around the questions that have shaped my dissertation chapters:
However, I would like to rethink this. If the point of my archive is what I claim (i.e. to endlessly repunctuate and remodel the data), then it should not be organized in the same way that my dissertation is organized. I would love to use this workshop to rethink the collections I might develop in my archive.
The purpose of the archive is to produce “archivists.” Whether or not they participate in “my” archive, I intend to enable and provoke an archiving practice, which is an end in itself because archiving changes the way you orient to your surroundings. Becoming an archivist changes what you can “see” and what you can “say.” What can/should be recorded? What can/should be made publicly available? These are not innocent questions. “We don’t even know what the body (of an archive) can do!”
This archive is just now coming into its own. That is, I have only just begun to take the archive as a question, rather than an assumption. It started as an iteration of the Quotidian Anthropocene, and still reflects a number of the design logics of that project. However, substantive changes have been made to the questions that have guided the collection and curation of the data it contains and that I am still in the process of depositing. As previously stated, I had tried to enroll my interlocutors into the archiving process, but I wasn’t able to draw their interest well enough. I am hopeful that the collections and essays I will be making in the near future will change that.
This archive is intended to expose its own discursive risks… which is a carrot on a stick. That is, though it will also inevitably reproduce them (there is always an outside to thought), the archive is intended to encourage a practice of looping attention back onto its own “unthought” aspects. It is intended to put these discursive risks to work! To use them to as opportunities for recognizing the way our categories of thought, speech, and experience continue to reflect the stratification and sedimentation of power relations.
In seeking to continually pull the rug from under one’s feet, one discursive risk could be paralysis… of oneself or of others. Which means care must be taken not to deterritorialize too much, too deeply, too quickly. Care and strategy are paramount.
This archive is designed to gain awareness of and resist Austin’s regimes of divisible governance (Howey and Neal 2022), by enabling interested parties (of whom I, myself, am one) to question the theories, practices, categories, and figures and grounds that have shape their understandings and experiences of environmental and energy justice (as a frame and practice).
This archive is designed less to “recollect” than facilitate a re-modelling practice. Being itself a practice, archiving offers a different way of inhabiting the world, potentially giving way to new modes of vision and articulation.
This is an interesting question. I observed and worked with many different groups who have different stakes in Austin’s energy transition and don’t always see eye to eye (engineers, lawyers, ej activists, environmentalists, clean energy entrepreneurs, etc.). All of them are implicated, and many might have interest in participating in the archiving project, but (I am assuming) not all for the same reason.
The archive could serve as something like a “boundary object’ for their collaboration (see Star’s work on the concept). It would be interesting to have participants with a diversity of expertise, politics, and ethics working in the same archive, but not exactly (or not necessarily) working together. Perhaps using PECE’s groups functions to organize different spaces for siloed work along with spaces for intersection. It would be fascinating to see if and how their artifacts and analytics traveled across these groups.
Sunrise ATx and 350 Austin are two groups that I believe I could recruit fairly easily. They both have active campaigns that include some kind of research, and could benefit from a collaborative research infrastructure. Depending on their experience and the collections they manage to produce, I might be able to branch out from there.
RQ: How have the systems/assemblages that have produced Austin’s social, environmental, and ecological problems also shaped the way people conceive and work to resolve these problems?
We would need to collect data on Austin’s:
Techno-political ecology: i.e. the relations across its physical geography/ecology/climate, built environment/infrastructure, governance structure, and economy. This could be gathered by talking with and enrolling the help of various local experts as well as through online research of the City’s, Austin Energy’s, and ERCOT’s websites and online archives, other public archives, and through reading secondary literature.
Social ecology: i.e. Austin’s diverse environmental communities, organizations, governance structures, local forms of environmentalism in practice, etc. This could be achieved by asking informed locals of the relevant groups they are aware of, along with research into Austin’s online forums, social media, environmental “meetup” groups, and by conducting participant observations while attending group meetings, learning their structures, keeping track of City processes, etc.
Mental ecology: i.e. how various collectives differentially conceive the challenges, risks, and affordances of transitioning this ecology to something more just and sustainable. This would require more extensive participant observation and interviews, as well as some social media and mainstream media analysis.
Discursive ecology: i.e. how the different perspectives specified above are differentially framed, discussed, and evaluated, and what modes of expertise, and/or (political/linguistic/data) ideologies characterize these modes of evaluation. Once again, this would require more enduring forms of research, akin to classic ethnographic methods of participant observation and interviews. Strategic sites, such as “trading zones” would also be valuable here, as they offer instances of clash between different perspectives. Contrasting mainstream media coverage with what is said in conversation, in meetings, in blogs, and social media posts would also get at some of the differences between Austin’s hegemonic and subversive discourses.
In order to address the RQ, however, we would need to think across, between, and also outside these data sets, working against these categorizations in order to open them up to further recategorizations. And likely drawing inspiration from realms beyond direct relevance to energy, environmental, or local austin-related concerns: i.e. from social theory, philosophy, literature, art, the sciences, etc.
On second thought, I could have never come to the conclusions I made in my dissertation by studying the field alone, or even by supplementing fieldwork with readings of the anthropological canon, or by reading outside this canon. The idea of the archive (just like my take on the scales and systems, and the importance I came to place on the “temporality” of scale, and many other fundamental arguments of my dissertation) came from, and could only come from my involvement in the many collaborative side projects in which I have been lucky enough to be included. It has been messy. It has been non-linear. It has produced rupture, surprise, and chance, rather than being positivistic, additive, or “logical" in flow. But this is the only way to produce something new, instead of simply legitimating what is already known. (Though, of course, with the ever-present risk of still failing to produce something new... There are no guarantees!)
This archive is situated squarely within Austin’s social, energy, and environmental politics, including the City’s regime of divisible governance (Howey and Neal 2022), which is, itself, situated within Texas’s own divisible governance regime. Popular cultural imaginaries of the state of Texas often entail a rugged/rural, conservative, and enthusiastically capitalist socio-political landscape that is drenched in petro-politics (which is not completely inaccurate). Austin, by contrast, has a well-known reputation as a liberal (or neoliberal), environmentally friendly, artsy, high-tech, opportunity rich, and lively cultural scene. However, Austin is also gaining recognition as one of the most racially segregated and economically unequal cities in the United States. While some of Austin’s persistent environmental problems can be rooted in the City’s past and present struggle to resist the callous environmental politics of the state, the municipal government is more directly culpable for the production and reproduction of its local social inequities.
This archive is dedicated to enabling multiple and iterative “re-punctuations” of Austin’s past and present. This entails tracing the multi-dimensional connections between its development as a liberal and environmental technopolis and its sordid history of racial inequality and racial violence, rampant homelessness, gentrification, and environmental injustice. That is, the archive is designed to resist Austin’s regime of “divisible governance,” which has enabled/produced and characterized the way Austinites conceive and engage in energy/environmental politics. To resist these divisions, I have selected “eco-logics” as the archive’s primary “substantive logic.” Influenced by Bateson’s conception of an ecology of mind, Guattari’s notion of ecosophy, and Fortun’s approach to the entangled scales and systems of late industrialism, this archive is designed to enable an iterative meta-modeling of Austin’s techno-political, social, discursive, and mental ecologies, to help scholars, activists, renewable advocates and entrepreneurs, utility staff, public officials, and even your casually interested Austinite to diagram the gaps, frictions, barriers, and feedback loops between the multi-scalar processes that have both enabled and restricted Austin’s ability to perform an expedient and just transition to a more ecologically sound society.