Tia-Simone Garder, a Black feminist scholar and a cross-disciplinary, mixed media artist asks, "what do histories and cartographies that trace and locate Black mobility along a river that moves between the Gulf of Mexico and Minnesota reveal about the lives and ...Read more
Kim Fortun discusses the role of digital infrastructures and visualization practices in rendering toxics legible.Read more
Title: Dropping toxicity
The original piece on the right is from AP Photo/Evan Vucci (2017) and the one in the left if from Erika P. Rodriguez (2017). Using a collage from Hurricane Maria I wanted to juxtapose how the U.S saw themselves while providing aid vs. how Puerto Ricans saw the aid they where receiving. Furthermore, I am trying to bring to light the narrative that U.S aid was toxic.
Title: Deepening Toxicity
The original photo on the left taken was taken by Alexis C. Schneider in 2017 and shows a Marine Corps (Lance Cpl) shopping down trees to open-up a road. However, not all army personnel aid Puerto Ricans, other develop their time to deepen the hurricane consequences (toxicity). The landscape photo was taken by: Glenn Vaagen on December 26, 2017 and it was highlighted in the Weather website.
Title: Ignoring Toxicity
During the U.S president first visit after Hurricane Maria, he expressed that the government had done a good job because at that time the death toll was 64. However, media and citizen reports had a very different number counts. It was not until de Harvard Report that revealed that the actual number was 4,645 that the government started to admit that they numbers where probably wrong. George Washington University report, which it came a couple of months after the Harvard report expose e death toll of more than 3,000. U.S President reaction to it was totally ignoring the death toll and even saying that people did not die. The original picture was taken by Mario Tama/Getty Images (2017).
The archive can be viewed as a literal place in the sense that these materials are stored in physical and digital archives. The use of "archive" for this essay is more of an imagined place of the...Read more
At first viewing, I was not certain the composition worked at conveying the disrupture happening. However, after looking again, and considering the placing of the text in its homage to horror-camp...Read more
The notion of "trace" in the archive becomes more of a remedy to toxicity. Trace comes to mean a slight sign of what is excluded, a means of interrogating the silences in the archive.Read more
In October 2008, the journal Environmental History released a special issue titled "toxic bodies/toxic environments: an interdisciplinary forum" to bring together environmental historians, science studies scholars, and historians of science to reflect on "cultural models and historical...Read more