EDC Book Club: Futures After Progress by Chloe Ahmann

Please RSVP to join the EDC Book Club later this month for a discussion of Chloe Ahmann’s new book, Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore. Cornell University anthropologist Chloe Ahmann will be joining us for the discussion, together with EDC curator Anand Pandian.

A powerful ethnographic study of South Baltimore, a place haunted by toxic pasts in its pursuit of better futures.

Factory fires, chemical explosions, and aerial pollutants have inexorably shaped South Baltimore into one of the most polluted places in the country. In Futures after Progress, anthropologist Chloe Ahmann explores the rise and fall of industrial lifeways on this edge of the city and the uncertainties that linger in their wake. Writing from the community of Curtis Bay, where two hundred years of technocratic hubris have carried lethal costs, Ahmann also follows local efforts to realize a good future after industry and the rifts competing visions opened between neighbors.

Examining tensions between White and Black residents, environmental activists and industrial enthusiasts, local elders and younger generations, Ahmann shows how this community has become a battleground for competing political futures whose stakes reverberate beyond its six square miles in a present after progress has lost steam. And yet—as one young resident explains—“that’s not how the story ends.” Rigorous and moving, Futures after Progress probes the deep roots of our ecological predicament, offering insight into what lies ahead for a country beset by dreams deferred and a planet on the precipice of change.

Chloe Ahmann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. Much of her work is set in Baltimore, and considers what efforts to think and enact environmental futures look like from the sedimented space of late industrialism. She is also beginning research on ecofascist sentiments in the United States, and the dark utopian visions that sustain them.

Wednesday, May 29th, 2024
11-12 PM ET
EDC Book Club Video Room

Futures After Progress is available as an open-access download via this link:
https://bibliopen.org/9780226833606

Our discussion will focus on the following sections of the book — Preface: The Dust, Introduction, Little Boxes, Cataclysmic Hypotheticals, Beautiful City, Art of the Possible

For those who can’t join live that day, please share your thoughts via the discussion thread about the book in the EDC Book Club group. We’ll continue the conversation there.

Stay tuned for more book conversations each month, and please join the EDC Book Club to take part in our discussions and share your favorite reads!