Capitalism is the Virus: A Public Receipt of Financialization in New Orleans 1971-2021

This thesis explores the financialization of one residential-commercial corridor in New Orleans, Louisiana. The paper illuminates the transformations of neighborhoods and social spaces wrought by processes of rapidly inflating property values and the displacement of residents. The study works in the field of applied public research by mapping New Orleans property and land records valued through the Orleans Parish Assessor’s office and linking recorded corridor changes to stated goals and partner initiatives at the city level. Taking specific umbrage with commercial corridor revitalization framework and urban street corridor mapping projects, this thesis offers a reworked lens of historical material analysis. It uses the Saint Claude Avenue corridor and the histories of some of its inhabitants to lay out a receipt of public record from the financializing operations, financial vehicles, and the subsequently related phenomena of financialization in New Orleans between 1971 and 2021

Waste and everyday environmentalism in modern Britain

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this recordFollowing recent work among social historians and geographers on the concept of ‘everyday life’, I argue that current historical uses of the term are problematic, at least for environmental historians, in that they lack a sufficiently disciplined or coherent conceptual basis. Henri Lefebvre’s approach to the everyday offers one productive way of rethinking the significance of the environment for social history. Through an empirical study of the politics of urban waste disposal in twentieth-century Britain, I deploy some of the key categories of Lefebvre’s ‘critique of everyday life’ to rethinking the social history of environmentalism. In particular, I seek to explore what Alex Loftus has called an ‘everyday environmentalism’. I argue that the concept of ‘everyday environmentalism’, with its attention to dialectics, antinomy and contradiction, can transform the ways in which we study the social history of the human relation to nature, which has too often been viewed through reified notions of environmental change. The paper concludes that the history of environmental politics should focus far more on environmentalism as a concrete social phenomenon emerging from lived experience.Some of the research for this article was supported by the Wellcome Trust under Grant 091819/Z/10/Z

Contextualizing climate justice activism: knowledge, emotions, motivations, and actions among climate strikers in six cities

In August 2018, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg started to strike from school on Fridays to protest against a lack of action on the climate crisis. Her actions sparked a historically large youth movement, leading to a series of school strikes across the world. Over the course of one week in September 2019, striking school children, students and other grassroots movements, such as Extinction Rebellion, called for everyone to participate in a global Climate Strike. This paper is based on comparative research with climate protesters in six cities: Brighton and London (United Kingdom), Montreal (Canada), New Haven and New York (USA), and Stavanger (Norway). Based on original interviews with 64 protesters, the study examines their knowledge, emotions, motivations, and actions in relation to climate change, including any lifestyle changes they have undertaken before or after their protests. Our findings show that protesters have varying degrees of knowledge about climate change, and have taken a range of actions in their own lives to address climate change. They also manifest a wide spectrum of emotions about climate change, and different motivations for taking part in climate strikes. These features are under-studied and dynamically evolving at the present conjuncture. On this basis, we call for expanded academic attention to human, emotional, epistemic, and seemingly mundane aspects of climate protests, their structural tendencies and relational expressions, and the implications for our ability to address underlying drivers

Men Alone Cannot Settle a Country : Domesticating Nature in the Kansas-Nebraska Grasslands

W h e n she traveled to Kansas from New York in November 1875 to join a husband who had gone west six months earlier, Sarah Anthony faced bitter disappointment. Her daughter, who made the journey as well, remembered that her mother often cried during the first few months. [T]hese pioneer women [were] so suddenly transplanted from homes of comfort in the eastern states, wrote the daughter, to these bare, treeless, wind swept, sun scorched prairies - with no conveniences - no comforts, not even a familiar face. Everything was so strange and so different from the life they had always known and with nothing to encourage them, but the thought of duty and that in proving faithful to its demands. What caused Anthony\u27s discontent, at least in part, was an unfamiliar and alien landscape, as yet untouched by the hand of domesticity. With dedication and fortitude, however, the place could be remade