Trauma, Reparations and Redevelopment in Detroit: Ethnographic Snapshots of Environmental Justice Struggles

• In Event: 1451 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 17. Structural Inequalities

Abstract

This paper examines six different scenes or ethnographic snapshots of Detroit, all dealing with questions of redevelopment, based on ethnographic interviews and participant observation, through the lens of trauma and reparations. The larger goal of the paper is twofold: 1) to expand the discussion of trauma to include not just individuals and communities, but social spaces at the sub-neighborhood level; and 2) to broaden development discussions to include consideration of the cumulative and immediate effects of localized trauma within such spaces. These scenes are all drawn from research conducted on the East Side of Detroit in the years following the Great Recession, leading up to and following the subsequent municipal bankruptcy, a time where Detroit has been increasingly discussed in terms of its rebirth or redevelopment as opposed to its death or decline. As these examples show, such portrayals rely often rely on an implicit erasure of a troubled past, one that is also loaded with trauma of various kinds. In each of these scenes, we examine how this trauma emerges and asserts itself, demanding recognition and acknowledgment of the wrongs of the past, most especially those related to race. I also use these examples to help point us in the direction of redevelopment strategies that are not only trauma-informed, but consciously reparative.

Author

• Paul Joseph Draus, University of Michigan