Infrastructure and Inequality: Environmental Histories from around the World

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

Please Note: This session is being sponsored by CODIE (ASEH’s Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity)

Panel Description:
An increasing number of environmental historians have begun examining how poor and minority communities face a host of environmental inequities, from toxic waste sites to polluted drinking water to unhealthy housing. Yet fewer scholars have focused their research on a foundational cause of such inequalities – infrastructure. Whether constructed by global, federal, state, or local entities, infrastructure has dramatically transformed the built environment in ways that benefit some groups of people while hurting others.

This panel on the environmental inequities of infrastructure will compare and contrast the histories of large infrastructure projects around the world, and in doing so raise several important questions:

• How do large infrastructure projects transform local knowledge about the natural environment?

• Conversely, how do ideas about nature espoused by poor, minority, and other disadvantaged groups influence state-sponsored infrastructure projects?

• Why does the rhetoric of infrastructure – from the notion of “scientific progress” to “economic benefits” to “improving upon nature” – often obscure the inequalities associated with infrastructural efforts?

• In what ways has inequality, not only within countries but also among them, shaped the relationship between infrastructure and the environment?

• Finally, how might environmental historians see infrastructure not only as sites of inequality but also as sites of learning, places where ideology meets materiality to produce deeper understandings of power inequalities?

This roundtable will explore these questions by convening scholars who are researching infrastructure projects around the world. Such projects include the construction of the Panama Canal, military bases in Northern Africa and East Asia, nuclear waste facilities in South America, and regional transportation networks in the United States. The panel will be moderated by an historian of Latin American and Latino/a Studies.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Moderator

• Javier Puente, Smith College

Presenters

• Gretchen Heefner, Northeastern University

• Paul Sutter, University of Colorado-Boulder

• Rebecca Herman, University of California-Berkley

• Neil Michael Maher, NJIT