Chloe Ahmann
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell, where I study how people politicize “impure” environments in the long afterlife of American industry. Much of my work is based in Baltimore, where I follow industrialism’s enduring traces in toxified landscapes, patchy regulation, quotidian expressions of white supremacy, and particular orientations toward time. I am especially interested in what kinds of environmental futures take form amid these legacies. This research culminates in my first book, "Futures after Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore," published in 2024 by the University of Chicago Press. Newer work, on far-right environmentalism in the Pacific Northwest United States, moves to fresh terrain but stays with these core themes.
For more on my research and teaching, visit www.chloeahmann.com.
For more on my research and teaching, visit www.chloeahmann.com.
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Papers by Chloe Ahmann
Examining tensions between White and Black residents, environmental activists and industrial enthusiasts, local elders and younger generations, Ahmann shows how this community has become a battleground for competing political futures whose stakes reverberate beyond its six square miles in a present after progress has lost steam. And yet—as one young resident explains—“that’s not how the story ends.” Rigorous and moving, Futures after Progress probes the deep roots of our ecological predicament, offering insight into what lies ahead for a country beset by dreams deferred and a planet on the precipice of change.