Ties That Bind: Toxic Pollution, Urban Brownfields, and the Embodiment of Class and Gender in Post-Industrial Southeast Chicago.
Dr. Christine Walley
Chris Walley is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT. She is currently completing a book Exit Zero: An Anthropologist’s Account of Family and Class in the United States (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press) and an accompanying documentary film also entitled Exit Zero made with filmmaker Chris Boebel. Both projects use family stories to explore the meaning of the loss of the steel industry for residents of Southeast Chicago and the long-term impact that deindustrialization has had on expanding class inequalities in the United States. The talk considers the implications of pervasive toxic brownfields for the region’s future and for how class, gender and race come to be embodied in post-industrial landscapes.