1 - energy access/rights advocacy; 2 - energy transitions, locally, regionally, and nationally; 3 - public health and climate adaptation, including emergency preparedness; 4 - pandemic impacts research; 5 - urban ethnography
Four Substantive Logics: Reimagining energy literacy; Navigating the energy trilemma; Resisting vulnerability; Relief in time
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.
Purpose: At the moment this archive was created to document the following topics in Azusa, CA and Azusa High School: environmental hazards; school district/city/regional/county/state/federal environemntal hazards law and policy; 210 freeway history and documentation; history of wild fires the San Gabriel Mountains and Angeles National Forest; social and environmental history of city and schools; water rights history of Azusa.
This archive is a sub-set of a larger archive and project of the San Gabriel Valley with Dr. Nadine Tanio focused on the above issues within the larger geographic area.
As the archive will grow over the next year of research, I expect this to happen quickly.
Mapping EiJ in Azusa challenges the conceptualizations of place, boundaries, intersectionality, flows and disjunctures. Azusa is a city, connected and cut-off in ways similar to other small regional municipalities. An archive of Azusa is linked to multiple other cities not only by shared boundaries, but also by transporation flows of people, goods, air, faultlines that extend far beyond the cities bounded space. Therefore the Azusa archive must be nested and linked to other forms of cultural, natural, social, and economic formations.
How does one build a city archive while also representing the complexity of city-status around issue of justice, environmental or otherwise?
Mexico/U.S. migration - Approximately 50% of Urequío’s population migrated permanently to the Southern California cities of Long Beach and Wilmington following the U.S. Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, with continued migration occurring in subsequent years.
Freeway expansion, refineries, environmental injustice in the Harbor Region - These areas face severe environmental risks--including abnormally high cancer and asthma cases--due to their proximity to the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports (Barboza 2020). Moreover, this region hosts the highest concentration of refineries in the state, with drilling facilities located throughout many residential neighborhoods (CBE 2015).
Labor experience in the U.S. - braceros, canneries in Wilmington & San Pedro
Land reform in Mexico