Special Issues

This special issue is a research outcome from the collaborative Rising Waters project, including faculty and students from Penn and the Tata Institute for Social Sciences. My article, “Restoring a River, Re-Story-ing History,” investigates the tidal Schuylkill River and its vast refinery landscape, asking how petroscapes have been rendered opaque, illuminated only at moments of terrifying explosion. In the afterglow of the Philadelphia oil refinery’s spectacularly “close call” in 2019, city officials were confronted by a deep data poverty for refinery lands, waters, and neighborhoods where many residents, predominantly Black, live in an analog poverty perpetuated by data apartheid. The article uncovers the historical texture of urbanized wetlands, exploring how and by whom former marshland was made and maintained as a sacrifice zone. It also presents a set of interrelated community-based participatory research projects designed to document inhabitants’ lived experiences, largely absent from the historical record, and it argues that collaborations between university and community-based researchers can generate powerful tools for undoing harms and redressing environmental injustice. In the special issue’s introduction, I argue for the power of working within longer time horizons to make processes of “slow violence” comprehensible: how it entangles racialized and poorer populations in cities, sometimes for generations, locking them in situations of everyday yet durable harm and central to the creation, maintenance and reproduction of vulnerable non/human life in the city.