mCenter Director Mimi Sheller discusses her forthcoming book Aluminum Dreams: Lightness, Speed, Modernity (MIT Press, 2014)
For more information please contact mimi.sheller@drexel.edu
* please note that the European pronunciation of “aluminium” has been used throughout for a global audience
Posted in Research
Tagged Aluminum, Caribbean, Sustainability, Technology, Tourism, Transport
The mCenter is pleased to announce the award of a Rapid research grant from the National Science Foundation, with the following investigators in collaboration with CCNY:
Jorge E. Gonzalez (Principal Investigator) gonzalez@me.ccny.cuny.edu
Reza Khanbilvardi (Co-Principal Investigator)
Fred Moshary (Co-Principal Investigator)
Michael Piasecki (Co-Principal Investigator)
Mimi Sheller (Co-Principal Investigator)
AbstractThe two largest lakes in Haiti and the Dominican Republic are, respectively, the Saumatre and Enriquillo lakes, both of which are salt water lakes. Lake Enriquillo is at the lowest point in the Caribbean, and is within several miles of Lake Saumatre. Both lakes have been growing drastically in size over the past several years. The socio-economic impact of this growth of the lakes has been very dramatic. Since the lakes began their recent rapid growth, more than 15,000 hectares of agricultural and grass land around the lakes have been flooded, having a strong negative impact on 2,500 farms in 16 communities with total estimates of 10,000 individuals affected. Urgency to address this growth problem has risen sharply over the past few months due to the unprecedented water levels reached. Further, the Caribbean is in the midst of its tropical depression/hurricane season, a unique time for embarking on a research effort as the Lakes are responding to these extreme events in a unique fashion. The window is relatively short and if missed would require waiting an entire year to possibly get a similar weather pattern passing through the lakes region again. Meanwhile, the emergency resulting from floods will have worsened. The research plan integrates observations, integrated earth-system modeling and community engagement and is designed to lead to accelerated documentation of the causes of the growth and to support policy formulation for handling the consequences. The urgent questions in need of answers are: Through rapid monitoring and modeling, can the hypothesis be supported that a warming climate is impacting the overall hydro-balance of the lakes? How is this hydro-balance reflected in terms of lake volume and surface area? What may be the response of informed communities to the emergency presented by continuously expanding flood lands?
In relation to mobilities research the question of how communities adapt to climate change and disruptions caused by changing environmental conditions is very important. This project builds on previous research on post-earthquake Haiti, and also involves collaboration between engineers and social scientists.
For more information please contact Mimi Sheller, Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy, mimi.sheller@drexel.edu
Posted in Research
Tagged Caribbean, climate, disaster risk, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Water
Against Recovery?: Slavery, Freedom, and the Archive is an interdisciplinary conference that aims to foster discussion and debate about how emerging methods and archival practices in the study of slavery and freedom can generate new ideas about black political narratives in the Americas. For decades, a lack of evidence about enslaved and free black lives has presented an overwhelming challenge to historians, while simultaneously rendering slavery studies an exceptionally dynamic field. A new generation of scholars has probed the limits of history writing, adopting creative reading practices to make suppositions about the everyday lives, politics, and interior worlds of enslaved and free people. We bring together scholars whose work asks what happens if we do not look to the archive as merely a space of recovery and vindication, but as one in which we can glimpse the multiple ways our subjects might have fashioned blackness and imagined futures that do not sit easily with more common historical narratives of progress and continuity.
Dr. Mimi Sheller of Drexel University’s Center for Mobilities Research and Policy will be speaking on Saturday about the use of photographic archives in her new book Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom. A full schedule of the event can be found here.
Organized by Laura Helton, Justin Leroy, Max Mishler, Samantha Seeley, and Shauna Sweeney. Sponsored by New York University’s American History Workshop, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, the History Department, the English Department, the Humanities Initiative, the Institute of African American Affairs, the Workshop in Archival Practice, and CUNY Graduate Center.
Space is limited. To register, email againstrecovery@gmail.com. In your email, please indicate if you will/will not be attending the works-in-progress seminar. Registration for the Friday lunch is now closed.
Image credits: The Liberator, 7 January 1832 (vol. 11, p. 2), via Slavery Images, compiled by Jerome Handler and Michael Tuite, and sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library.
The Black Diaspora and a Queer Caribbean Freedom
Lecture & Discussion
Mimi Sheller, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Drexel University
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
2:30-5:30 pm
Rosati Room 300, Richardson Library
2350 North Kenmore Ave, Chicago
The Center for Black Diaspora has entered a partnership with Chicago Amplified, a project of WBEZ, Chicago Public Radio to enhance the outreach of our events in the Chicago community. Select public programs presented by the Center for Black Diaspora are now available for listening as a part of Chicago Amplified, a new web-based audio library of diverse educational events recorded throughout the Chicago region.
A successful book launch was held at the 37th Annual Conference of the Caribbean Studies Association, Guadeloupe, for Mimi Sheller’s Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom (Duke University Press, 2012). Presenter: Deborah Thomas.
Deborah Thomas presenting Mimi Sheller’s new book, Citizenship from Below
Mimi Sheller, Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy, is Professor of Sociology at Drexel University and the author of Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica and Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. You can now read the introduction to Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom, here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/87835013/Citizenship-from-Below-by-Mimi-Sheller. For more information, and to order the book directly from Duke University Press, please visit http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid= 18033
The Caribbean Studies Association (CSA) is an independent professional organization devoted to the promotion of Caribbean studies from a multidisciplinary, multicultural point of view. It is the primary association for scholars and practitioners working on the Caribbean Region (including Central America and the Caribbean Coast of South America). Its members come from the Caribbean Region, North America, South America, Central America, Europe and elsewhere even though more than half of its members live in the United States many of them teaching at U.S. universities and colleges. Some of the other wonderful titles also launched at the event included:
Keith McNeal, Trance and Modernity in the Southern Caribbean: African and Hindu Popular Religions in Trinidad and Tobago, University Press of Florida, USA, 2011. Presenter: Karen Richman
Nadève Ménard, Ecrits d’Haiti: Perspectives sur la littérature haïtienne contemporaine (1986‐2006), Karthala, France, 2011. Presenter: Régine Jean‐Charles
Diana Paton and Maarit Forde (eds), Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing, Duke University Press, USA, 2012. Presenter: Faith Smith
Schuller, Mark and Morales, Pablo (eds.), Tectonic Shifts: Haiti since the Earthquake, Kumarian Press, USA, 2012. Presenter: Claudine Michel
Deborah Thomas, Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transitional Jamaica. Duke University Press, USA. 2011. Presenter: Alissa Trotz
Book Launch Audience
I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book, Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom (Duke University Press).
Citizenship from Below boldly revises the history of the struggles for freedom by emancipated peoples in post-slavery Jamaica, post-independence Haiti, and the wider Caribbean by focusing on the interplay between the state, the body, race, and sexuality. Mimi Sheller offers a new theory of “citizenship from below” to describe the contest between “proper” spaces of legitimate high politics and the disavowed politics of lived embodiment.
“This is a stimulating, thought-provoking book of lasting significance to scholarship on the Caribbean, citizenship, sexuality, and embodiment. The way that Mimi Sheller puts the literatures on embodiment and citizenship into dialogue is impressive and important. After reading her analysis of these two bodies of scholarship, I will never again be able to think about one without considering the other. Citizenship from Below is a very distinguished book, one which will be widely read and discussed.”—Diana Paton, co-editor of Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing
For more information, and to order the book directly from Duke University Press, please visit http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid= 18033
You can now read the introduction to Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom, here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/87835013/Citizenship-from-Below-by-Mimi-Sheller
A book launch will be held at the Caribbean Studies Association 37th Annual Conference with the theme “Unpacking Caribbean Citizenship: Rights, Participation and Belonging”, 28 May to 1 June 2012 in Guadeloupe.
Mimi Sheller is Professor of Sociology at Drexel University and the author of Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica and Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies.
Artwork by Kara Walker
Dr David Lambert
Department of History, University of Warwick, UK
Different forms of human and non-human mobility and immobility were implicated in the articulation of human subjectivity, racial identities and contests over power and liberty in Caribbean societies during and after slavery. Although the use of concepts of mobility to illuminate histories of slavery has been limited, much scholarship on Caribbean and wider American slavery has been implicitly concerned with movement, most notably the transport of enslaved people across the Atlantic. Such macro-level quantitative work has been supplemented by more ‘human histories’ of slavery and transatlantic movement.
This talk will extend such concerns to Caribbean slave societies and those that replaced them after emancipation. It brings attention to the ‘non-human histories’ of slavery that were evident in that troubling space where encounters with non-humans were entangled with contests over a racialized human/non-human boundary. The particular focus is the Euro-American encounter with the late 18th and early 19th century Caribbean. Focusing on such recurrent images as the ‘animal-like’ black slave, the ‘brutish’ white master, the beast-of-burden and the agency of sugarcane, it considers how the nature of Caribbean slavery was not only encountered as a political structure, system of labor or field of infra-human metaphors, but encompassed a series of fraught meetings with monstrous natures and even more monstrous humanity.
Sponsored by the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy, Africana Studies, the Department of English and Philosophy, the Department of History and Politics.
Free and Open to the Public
Contact: Mimi Sheller, mimi.sheller@drexel.edu
Final Letter from Haiti
A beautiful rural habitation in Leogane region
The following is the final letter from Jen Britton, Drexel Engineering Cities Initiative (DECI) research coordinator, who traveled to Leogane, Haiti, with a DECI team. The group, which also includes Drs. Franco Montalto, Michael Piasecki and Patrick Gurian from the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering in the College of Engineering, and Dr. Mimi Sheller from the Department of Culture and Communication and the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy in the College of Arts and Sciences, are working on the National Science Foundation-funded “Supporting Haitian Infrastructure Reconstruction Decisions with Local Knowledge” project. The project aims to gather information about area stakeholders’ needs, interests and priorities regarding any future improvements to the local water, sanitation and stormwater control infrastructure.
At the end of just one week in Leogane it seems like we’ve been here much longer, as each day has been packed not only with data-gathering but also with all the meetings, greetings and logistical puzzles that go along with transporting a team of 13—six local enumerators and seven Drexel faculty, staff and subcontractors—in two SUVs to various points of deployment around the region.
Yesterday had us back in the mountains visiting an agricultural settlement, where generous residents gave a tour of some of the problem areas created by deforestation and erosion as well as a sense of the difficulties of dealing with sanitation and water-access facilities that were damaged by the earthquake. While many families’ latrines are still nominally standing, there have been enough stories of post-quake collapse and injury that many people are too fearful to use the ones that remain. And in these hilly areas, collecting water becomes even more challenging when the walk to the nearest source of potable water might be 20 or more minutes over difficult terrain.
With the time that is left today, we’re headed to Port-au-Prince so that Dr. Piasecki and Dr. Montalto can make an appearance on the nationally broadcast television chat show hosted by Kompe Filo, a Haitian folk hero and journalist. The hour-long interview, with English-Kreyol translation by our team member Yves Rebecca, was a demonstration that high quality journalism is alive and well.
As we pack up our survey results, MobileMappers, interview notes and laptops, planning is already underway for our second-phase trip back to Leogane later in the summer. On this subsequent visit we’ll pursue additional interviews and feedback from relevant public officials and NGO representatives. The main event will be a public workshop that will use the results of these early data collection efforts to begin shaping the Leogani feedback into a coherent picture of how further water development might look in a locally controlled, technologically appropriate context.
For more information, visit http://mcenterdrexel.wordpress.com/.
Approved under the authority of Philip Terranova, Vice President for University Relations
Bill Clinton visiting Leogane
Following is another letter, dated June 3, 2010, from Jen Britton, Drexel Engineering Cities Initiative (DECI) research coordinator, who is currently in Leogane, Haiti, with a DECI team. The group, which also includes Drs. Franco Montalto, Michael Piasecki and Patrick Gurian from the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering in the College of Engineering, and Dr. Mimi Sheller from the Department of Culture and Communication and the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy in the College of Arts and Sciences, are working on the National Science Foundation-funded “Supporting Haitian Infrastructure Reconstruction Decisions with Local Knowledge” project. The project aims to gather information about area stakeholders’ needs, interests and priorities regarding any future improvements to the local water, sanitation and stormwater control infrastructure.
We’ve now passed the halfway point of our week here in Leogane. Yesterday we deployed our enumerator team for their first morning collecting street surveys on residents’ experiences and attitudes about water access. The enumerators are six university students from Port-au-Prince and Leogane.
The rest of us have brought in a considerable amount of information in the past two days as well. Drs. Montalto and Piasecki have mapped a range of drainage ditches, wells and latrines throughout the city of Leogane, gathering information from residents living near these features about where they get their drinking water, whether they have latrine or toilet access nearby, the incidence of flooding and the like. Drs. Gurian and Sheller have completed close to 20 mental modeling interviews with a diverse set of informants that includes a local farmer, hospital staff, NGO representatives and tent camp residents. All of these conversations are starting to form a coherent picture of the strengths, shortcomings and design challenges for upgrading the water and sanitation infrastructure.
On today’s schedule was a meeting of the WASH Cluster (the NGOs in Leogane working on issues of water, sanitation and hygiene), where Dr. Sheller found herself saying hello to President Bill Clinton who had dropped into Leogane for the morning to visit a tent camp and some volunteer rubble removal projects. There was also a meeting to get the Drexel team up to speed on the cooperative project between DINEPA (the new Haitian water authority instituted by the minister of public works and transportation), a member of the NGO Hands On Disaster Response who happens to have the right water infrastructure expertise, and the town’s plumber to map out status of the piped water system in Leogane.
Haitian bloggers have been circulating this video of a “Master Plan” for the development of Haiti’s 287 sq mile island of La Gonave as an “international island operated as a business”. It is a remarkable example of the literal carving up of a prostrate country for the development of oil refineries, monocrop plantations, commercial water privatization, cruise ship ports, coast-to-coast all-inclusive resorts, golf courses and luxury villas. There will be small reserves left for the “natives” to live in faux-historic villages where they can be on view in “cultural performances” when not serving as chambermaids and plantation workers. Access will be via first a private executive airport and then by its own international airport, bypassing Haitian national authorities to give developers and tourists easy access to their own little “island paradise”. This loss of sovereignty and citizenship is typical of resort development throughout much of the Caribbean, including current massive developments along the coasts of nearby Jamaica, as seen in our recent screening of Esther Figueroa’s film Jamaica for Sale. But this plan is especially stunning in its comprehensive nature, bald land grab, environmental destruction, and cynical combination of industry, tourism, and property development under the green-washed guise of “renewable energy”. In the context of Haiti’s huge need for post-earthquake reconstruction, the developer “Global Renewable Energy” claims to be bringing jobs to the desperate people of Haiti, even though most jobs in such developments are usually filled by foreign contracted workers. It is not clear how far this plan has progressed with the Government of Haiti, but everything should be done to stop it now.
