In this PECE essay, I examine how the coast is being constructed as a risky place (and the meanings of risk) around the world and in Chennai. I study what it means to render Chennai coastal through the coastal cities narrative proposed in global climate change discourses and what other city narratives might be bracketed out or emerge through engaging with the coastal cities narratives.
Chennai, like most cities, is layered with multiple histories and its people live across diverse geographies. Yet in the current historical juncture, the story of Chennai’s socio-ecological and infrastructural changes has become knowable primarily as a story about its coast. I argue that ‘coastal chennai’ as an analytical category indexes multiple forms of toxicity--planetary climate toxicities, environmental pollution from industrial effluents, and the political economic inequalities structuring fishing economies and the social life of coastal communities.
Los Angeles has a deep connection to slavery, but those who were subjected to having to grapple with the institution and its legacies in early California have been relatively absent from the archive. California’s early history invokes images of white pioneers who settled in California from the mid 19th century to early 20thcentury.
Using a combination of semiotic, ecological, and spatial frameworks, this photoessay explores how the city of Austin, Texas can be said to function as a schismotopia; a heterotopia that is simultaneously thriving and toxic in a way that denotes a complementary process of schismogenesis. In one obvious sense, Austin is heterotopian in that it has a long established, popular reputation as a “weird”, young, and progressive oasis in a sea of Texas conservatism. But behind this veil of distinction there lies another, more insidious contradiction.
