Touring a cotton and orange farm in Maharashtra, India
Our group of anthropologists, videographers, and community organizers with some community O.U.T.R.A.G.E. members
Organizations United for Trash Reduction and Garbage Equity
Organizations United for Trash Reduction & Garbage Equity (O.U.T.R.A.G.E.) is an environmental justice coalition of more than two dozen community and civic groups dedicated to the reduction of waste transfer stations and waste truck traffic in the communities of Williamsburg and Greenpoint. O.U.T.R.A.G.E. members advocate for a more equitable and sustainable solid waste management plan in the City of New York.
My Involvement:
Working with various stakeholders, I conducted several series of interviews, including audio and visual research. Our goal was to understand in which ways we could successfully assist the wonderful work O.U.T.R.A.G.E. was already doing for the community. Our end result was an educational and promotional video called DUMPED ON that the organization uses to encourage community members to join the organization, and to provide evidence to policy makers and politicians of the environmental injustices taking place in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Politics of Nature
Scanned Color Film Photo, Wesleyan University Campus
For this project at Wesleyan University, I explored the theme of nature versus culture specifically using boundaries, lines and borderlands as a lens to inform our insights into the oppositional paradigm of nature and culture. Our group sought to explore human geography and everyday negotiations with space, to delve into the ways that the opposition plays out (or doesn’t) in our everyday practices and movement in our ‘natural’ context. Relying on personal narratives and engagements with space, we grounded our analysis, both in phenomenological experience and in our temporal and spatial context. The resulting product, a multimedia collage, included photographs, video, and excerpts from our interviews combined with sound bytes. The concept was to encourage people to engage with space in a new way and consider the oppositional forces between nature and culture that exist within our society. Through our installation in the Zilka Gallery at Wesleyan University, we were able present the subject matter through the perspective of how it is experienced and lived, in all of its entanglements, contradictions, and intricacies.