A friend on the coastal restoration advocacy side of things down here in south Louisiana put up a post on social media tonight that surprised and resonated with me. She wrote, "Across the Mississippi River from this spot is Fort St. Phillip. Years ago one of the bunkers built for war was converted into a …
Affect, Attention, and Ethnographic Research: Thoughts on Mental Health in the Field
Really digging on this post from Savage Minds... Affect, Attention, and Ethnographic Research: Thoughts on Mental Health in the Field March 30, 2016 Alix Johnson ...In public spaces, personal and professional, it’s surprising how often our year or so of fieldwork is alluded to as the time of our lives. In methods courses as much as …
Natural Infrastructures: Sediment, Science, and the Future of Southeast Louisiana
Excited to share this piece I just wrote up for the anthropology and environment society. Check it out here on their Engagements blog. Natural Infrastructures: Sediment, Science, and the Future of Southeast Louisiana "Losing a football field an hour" “Historical and projected coastal Louisiana land changes: 1978-2050” (www.lacoast.gov/landloss/newhistoricalland.pdf). Losing land at an average rate of approximately a …
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Measuring the Anthropocene into Existence
This is the first part of a piece written by my archeologist friend, Scott Schwartz, for the Penn Environmental Humanities lab. You can find the full text here. TEMPERATURE AND CONTROL: MEASURING THE ANTHROPOCENE INTO EXISTENCE Prior to the 17th century temperature didn’t exist. Only the privileged counted the number of years they’d endured or …
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Infrastructure + nature
Currently working on a blog post for Environment and Society about the way recent scholarly attention to infrastructures can help anthropologists think through changing human environment relations. The triptych below was taken while visiting a restoration project that just wrapped up in Barataria Bay this summer and is part of my discussion about the different infrastructures of restoration.
Monica Patrice Barra 