Papers by Lindsey Dillon
Sustainability: Approaches to Environmental Justice and Social Power (edited by Julie Sze), 2018
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In "Inevitably Toxic: Historical Perspectives on Contamination, Exposure, and Expertise" (Univers... more In "Inevitably Toxic: Historical Perspectives on Contamination, Exposure, and Expertise" (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). https://www.upress.pitt.edu/books/9780822945314/
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Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 2018
The dismantlement of evidence-based environmental governance by the Trump administration requires... more The dismantlement of evidence-based environmental governance by the Trump administration requires new forms of activism that uphold science and environmental regulatory agencies while critiquing the politics of knowledge production. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) emerged after the November 2016 U.S. presidential elections, becoming an organization of over 175 volunteer researchers, technologists, archivists, and activists innovating more just forms of government accountability and environmental regulation. Our successes include: (1) leading a public movement to archive vulnerable federal data evidencing climate change and environmental injustice; (2) conducting multisited interviews of current and former federal agency personnel regarding the transition into the Trump administration; (3) tracking changes to federal websites. In this article, we conduct a “social movement organizational autoethnography” on the field of movements intersecting within EDGI and on our theory, tactics, and practices. We offer ideas for expanding and iterating on methods of public, collaborative scholarship and advocacy.
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Book chapter in: Horiuchi, Lynne, and Tanu Sankalia, eds. Urban Reinventions: San Francisco's Tre... more Book chapter in: Horiuchi, Lynne, and Tanu Sankalia, eds. Urban Reinventions: San Francisco's Treasure Island. University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2017.
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This paper examines environmental racism as an embodied, everyday insecurity in US cities today. ... more This paper examines environmental racism as an embodied, everyday insecurity in US cities today. We considered the racialized vulnerability to pollution and anti-black police violence through the act of breathing, and specifically the conditions through which breath is constricted or denied. In conversation with Katherine McKittrick's analytical concept of " black geographies " and Frantz Fanon's writings on the embodiment of racism and the racialized segregation of space, we tell an alternative genealogy of state security practices and the production of insecurity in the US today. We argue that thinking about racism as an embodied and situated experience opens up connections with the environmental justice movement, which has challenged racialized exposures to pollution and consequent health inequalities. We explore the constriction of breath through asthma and police violence on the streets of San Francisco and New York today. In San Francisco, we focus on the toxic ecologies of an abandoned military base, while in New York, we discuss the conditions of Eric Garner's death and the politics of identifying responsibility for his killing. In so doing, we explore insecure breathing spaces in the US as racialized geographies, and how the phrase " I can't breathe " at once reflects these uneven environmental conditions and is also an assertion of the humanity of a population for whom human-ness, and life, has been historically denied.
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This paper examines environmental racism as an embodied, everyday insecurity in US cities today. ... more This paper examines environmental racism as an embodied, everyday insecurity in US cities today. We considered the racialized vulnerability to pollution and anti-black police violence through the act of breathing, and specifically the conditions through which breath is constricted or denied. In conversation with Katherine McKittrick's analytical concept of " black geographies " and Frantz Fanon's writings on the embodiment of racism and the racialized segregation of space, we tell an alternative genealogy of state security practices and the production of insecurity in the US today. We argue that thinking about racism as an embodied and situated experience opens up connections with the environmental justice movement, which has challenged racialized exposures to pollution and consequent health inequalities. We explore the constriction of breath through asthma and police violence on the streets of San Francisco and New York today. In San Francisco, we focus on the toxic ecologies of an abandoned military base, while in New York, we discuss the conditions of Eric Garner's death and the politics of identifying responsibility for his killing. In so doing, we explore insecure breathing spaces in the US as racialized geographies, and how the phrase " I can't breathe " at once reflects these uneven environmental conditions and is also an assertion of the humanity of a population for whom human-ness, and life, has been historically denied.
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Military bases are extremely polluted places, often contaminated with industrial wastes along wit... more Military bases are extremely polluted places, often contaminated with industrial wastes along with the various chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons of war. Today many former bases are converted to civilian use, a process requiring extensive remediation. The reuse of military bases involves extracting toxic sediments as well as the sedimented histories of war and military violence. This article examines questions of environmental injustice at two base conversion projects in San Francisco—at Naval Station Treasure Island and at the Hunters Point Naval Station—using Rob Nixon's (2011) concept of “slow violence.” Slow violence emphasizes the dispersed and slow moving forms of environmental disaster and toxic suffering, expanding the spatialities and temporalities by which we might understand environmental injustice. In relation to Hunters Point and Treasure Island, the concept of slow violence suggests that these base conversion projects are not simply “cleanups,” or breaks with the military's violent past, but are productive of new geographies and temporalities of toxic risk.
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Syllabi by Lindsey Dillon
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Course Description " Instead, then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they c... more Course Description " Instead, then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences, and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether it be a street, or a region or even a continent. "-Doreen Massey, " A Global Sense of Place " " What fell out of discussion was the ways in which the development of place created the grounds on which the crisis arose. "-Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California " If this paper seems preoccupied with the diaspora experience and its narratives of displacement, it is worth remembering that all discourse is 'placed' and the heart has its reasons. "-Stuart Hall, " Cultural Identity and Diaspora " How are ideas and practices of space and place entangled in producing, reworking, and challenging forms of social difference? What explains the uneven geographies of cities and regions, and how do these geopolitics lead to differential social outcomes, including health inequalities and premature death? Do ideas of place matter for our own sense of self, including the ways we do or don't identify with distant others? This graduate seminar in sociology explores the relations among spatiality, power, and social difference, beginning from the analytical position that space and society are co-constitutive processes, rather than distinct categories. Throughout the course, we bring the field of sociology in conversation with geography and geographically-minded theorists, focusing on the entanglements of race/racisms and space. We explore thematic conversations such as: racialized urban geographies, the political geography of prisons and incarceration, gender and space, diasporic space, embodiment, and spatialities of hope and alterity. Through discussion and writing, the class encourages students to experiment with the ways geographical concepts may inform their own research interests, methods, and analyses. Prerequisites: It is advised, but not required, that students have already taken courses in contemporary social theory, particularly in critical race studies or race and ethnicity.
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An upper division undergraduate course on Environmental Inequalities that focuses on extractive i... more An upper division undergraduate course on Environmental Inequalities that focuses on extractive industries and the Dakota pipeline
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Papers by Lindsey Dillon
Syllabi by Lindsey Dillon