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I am planning to eventually create a photo essay that tracks the development of Austin’s contemporary racial geography through time, from early paintings, maps, city plans, etc. to contemporary data visualizations.

A timeline of Austin’s energy infrastructure, resource planning updates, and official climate protection policy would be useful.

I have developed numerous PECE essays structured around the projects Scales and Systems analytic.

I am not sure what to tilte it... but I was thinking something that shifts the figure from the archive to the collective of archivists, something like "Austin EJ Archivist Collective." (Or, maybe just "Austin EJ Archive")This is the only public facing piece on the data this archive holds (for the moment): Petro-Ghosts and Just Transitions.

So far, I have been the sole contributor and curator. However, my intellectual curiosity in the archive has been increasing recently, as I have started to catch up with some of my colleagues’ in realizing its potential. I have and will continue to attempt to recruit other interested Austinites into this practice. I believe I will be better able to communicate its use. Not all of us are strong writers. Not all of us are comfortable with public speaking. The archive offers ways of articulating through collecting and curating.

This archive is situated squarely within Austin’s social, energy, and environmental politics, including the City’s regime of divisible governance (Howey and Neal 2022), which is, itself, situated within Texas’s own divisible governance regime. Popular cultural imaginaries of the state of Texas often entail a rugged/rural, conservative, and enthusiastically capitalist socio-political landscape that is drenched in petro-politics (which is not completely inaccurate).

RQ: How have the systems/assemblages that have produced Austin’s social, environmental, and ecological problems also shaped the way people conceive and work to resolve these problems? We would need to collect data on Austin’s:

This is an interesting question. I observed and worked with many different groups who have different stakes in Austin’s energy transition and don’t always see eye to eye (engineers, lawyers, ej activists, environmentalists, clean energy entrepreneurs, etc.). All of them are implicated, and many might have interest in participating in the archiving project, but (I am assuming) not all for the same reason. The archive could serve as something like a “boundary object’ for their collaboration (see Star’s work on the concept).

This archive is designed less to “recollect” than facilitate a re-modelling practice. Being itself a practice, archiving offers a different way of inhabiting the world, potentially giving way to new modes of vision and articulation.

This archive is designed to gain awareness of and resist Austin’s regimes of divisible governance (Howey and Neal 2022), by enabling interested parties (of whom I, myself, am one) to question the theories, practices, categories, and figures and grounds that have shape their understandings and experiences of environmental and energy justice (as a frame and practice).