Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Adopting temporal categories (pace, duration, trajectory, cycle), I demonstrate the utility of a temporal analysis of environmental hazards and conflicts. Drawing on six-months of field research in East Chicago, Indiana, I focus on a grassroots campaign against the approval of a permit for the permanent disposal of contaminated sediment into an existing disposal facility. I find that residents’ narratives and organizing strategies are temporally oriented in ways that create and maintain tension, shaping the scope of attention to past, present, and future implications of the permit. In problematizing the conditions of the permit, activists accentuate and complicate the temporality of environmental hazards and government accountability. Temporal structures elucidate how permits serve as a mechanism governing the increasing concentration of environmental risks in environmentally burdened neighborhoods. I argue that temporal structures vest authority in various stakeholders with the potential to enable and constrain environmental processes and outcomes.