In a 2013 essay in American Anthropologist, Andrea Muehlebach summarized the concept of “precarity” as “a shorthand for…the multiple forms of nightmarish dispossession and injury that our age entails.” Indeed, the last month has seen a collection of events, acute and ongoing, that characterize the precariousness of the historical present. In the U.S., July 26 marked the court-imposed deadline …
Tag Archives: Lead poisoning
Are We All Flint?
[This article originally appeared in Limn, Issue No. 7, “Public Infrastructures / Infrastructural Publics”.]
For the past several decades, Flint, Michigan, has staggered under waves of deindustrialization, disinvestment, and abandonment that have left the city depopulated, its built environment in shambles, and its remaining residents reeling from high unemployment and crime rates, a decimated tax base, and dwindling municipal …
Web roundup: Global health futures and hidden toxic histories
The Guardian began the year with a series of articles on innovation in global health. Devices such as “nanopatches” for pain free vaccinations that can be self administered are striking examples of technologies whose development and course to market can shed light on the role of design in possible futures of global health. As Peter Redfield has argued, …