Living on the Edge: Oysters, Life, and Property on Louisiana’s Coastal Frontier
Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, Living on the Edge lays bare how racialized property regimes that were developed on land operate offshore under conditions of climate change, showing how those with power seek to stabilize their claims to nearshore places when the constitution of water and land are radically transforming. I focus on the effects that shifting shorelines and state-funded water management projects have on power-laden, proprietary attitudes towards “common” offshore resources, such as oyster fisheries. Engaging with discourses of environmental justice, political ecology, STS, and legal anthropology, I interrogate the technical and everyday strategies people in coastal communities deploy to protect their claims under changing conditions.
View of the Caernarvon Diversion’s outfall area into Big Mar, protected by iron fencing.
Slop Chest
(Hannah Eisler Burnett & Tucker Rae-Grant, 2019)
This experimental film documents the two weeks artist Tucker Rae-Grant and I spent crossing the Atlantic on a cargo vessel that carried 4,400 shipping containers, twenty-three crew members, and four passengers. Turning our gaze away from the monumental, we studied the everyday items that came along for the ride. A “slop chest” is a store operated on merchant ships that sells personal requisites (such as tobacco) for issue to the crew, usually as a charge against their wages. Taking its cue from this institution, “Slop Chest” draws on ethnographic and visual methods in order to explore what is necessary—and what is desired—to survive a nine-month contract on a container ship.
Elaborating Waste
(Hannah Eisler Burnett & Allison Turner 2018)
In 2018, Allison Turner and I carried out a multidisciplinary project exploring the idea of waste. Over the last three centuries, capitalist growth has relied not only on the apparent abundance of the Earth’s natural resources but also on the ability of human innovators to transform waste products into raw materials for new ventures. Focusing on wastewater, we carried out interviews and site visits throughout the region serviced by Chicago’s Water Reclamation District. The project culminated in a sculptural installation that highlighted the material qualities of water that remain unaddressed by current regulatory and epistemological systems of water management, critiquing the idea of waste as a form of equivalence that is capable of endless repurposing.