Dominic Boyer

Activity: Hosting a visitorHosting an academic visitor

Description

The lecture focusses on a case study drawn from Boyer’s ongoing research in Northeast Houston, specifically a community-engaged rain garden project meant to create a prototype for greater community control over flooding in one of Houston’s most flood prone areas. It characterises the
community's experimental engagement with green infrastructure as an example of what might be called "infrastructural citizenship" (a kind of political community generated through civic engagement with infrastructural planning and implementation).

In Northeast Houston, this citizenship expresses civil power to defy white supremacist legacies of technopolitical flood control that have left Northeast Houston extraordinarily vulnerable to catastrophic flooding. Yet this citizenship also expresses commitments beyond stormwater management, taking aim at inherited infrastructural logics and traditions associated with other norms of American petroculture (e.g., spatialized and racialized environmental toxicity, translocal supply chains).

In contrast to the default petrosolidarity that ensnares the global North (and much of the global South) today. Boyer argues that initiatives like the rain garden project suggest important pathways for coastal communities in their effort to build civil power to challenge and resist the logics of a racist settler petrostate and the conditions of ecological emergency it perpetrates.
Period13 Nov 2024
Visiting fromRice University (United States)
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • community resilience
  • community development
  • community infrastructure
  • community networks
  • community participation
  • public space
  • placemaking
  • petroleum
  • climate change
  • urban gardens
  • cultural anthropology
  • Houston