University of Nottingham Science & Technology Studies Priority Group Seminar
“Emergency Housing, Toxic Exposure and the Political Theory of Walls”
Nick Shapiro
Institute of Cultural and Social Anthropology
University of Oxford
1 - 2pm, Thursday 31st May 2012
Room A100, West Wing
Law & Social Sciences Building
University Park, NG7 2RD
Abstract
In describing the spatial quality of citizenship, Hannah Arendt observed that historically the outer walls of the city were intimately entwined with the laws of the city, and that within the city the walls of the home bound enclaves of domestic autonomy. The spatial upheaval wreaked upon the Gulf Coast in 2005 by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita neutralized both classes of walls-- levees were breached and homes lay open. As other governmental agencies mended the perforated levees, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) began deploying emergency housing units, known as FEMA trailers. The walls of these units were charged with the task of reinstating the spatial syntax of the Gulf Coast, of separating ruins from residence. Yet, after years of complaints, these very walls were found to be the source of potentially toxic formaldehyde off gassing.
The walls of the trailers, in Arendt’s view, help maintain their inhabitants humanity, yet their chemical composition throws into jeopardy the very ‘biological life process’ they aim to protect. In their supply of the trailers, FEMA assumed, with Arendt, the binary function of the domestic wall: it is either intact and provides privacy and humanity or it is absent and former residents are unrelentingly laid open to political life and without material protection. Drawing upon two years of ethnographic fieldwork this paper begins to develop a qualitative and agentive theory of walls
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Paul Nathanail
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