“Producing An Intimate Inventory: Race and Waste in an Aluminum Town”
This dissertation project focuses on Badin, North Carolina, a segregated company town for workers at the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), from its establishment in 1915 to present-day issues of environmental injustice.
Vasudevan has developed a play, “Race and Waste in an Aluminum Town,” narrating the story of predominantly black West Badin with excerpts from oral histories and observation from community meetings. This talk will focus on the intimacy of racial capitalism. Industrial toxicity intimately binds race to waste, as manifested in disconcertingly familial relations in the factory, in quotidian practices of caregiving, and in affectively charged natural landscapes.
A PhD candidate in Geography at UNC-Chapel Hill, Pavithra Vasudevan studies the stuff of environmental justice: toxicity, racism, and social movements. She supports the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network as a member of the Planning Committee. Artistic research projects include a short film, “Remembering Kearneytown,” and “Race and Waste in an Aluminum Town,” a play illustrating 20th century racial capitalism. She is the founding co-president of the Hurston Collective for Critical Performance Ethnography at UNC-Chapel Hill and the 2016-17 McColl Fellow at the Center for the Study of the American South.
This discussion is free and open to the public, but RSVPs to pathorn@unc.edu are appreciated. Light refreshments will be served.