Talk by Associate Professor Alex Blanchette, Tufts University
Co-hosted by Fencing the Feral and thew Research Programme of Anthropology, AU
Alex Blanchette is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the department of Anthropology, Tufts University. He his Ph.D. in Anthropology from The University of Chicago. His research is concerned with the politics of industrial labor and life in a post-industrial United States.
Chicago’s Bubbly Creek is complicated waterway: an ecology overwhelmed by industrial violence, a premonition of racial capitalism’s planet-distorting powers, and the historical locus of logics of biosecurity that make modern animal agribusiness possible. Between 1865 and 1920, blood and entrails from millions of hogs, cows, and sheep were dumped in the south fork of the South Chicago river. Labeled the animate “child of the stockyards” in the early 20th century, Bubbly Creek is an inadvertent feat of industrial engineering that still occasionally churns with bubbles to this day — as pockets of gas spring from the slow-decomposing sediment of 19th century animal blood and entrails. Over the past 100 years, there have been numerous proposals to return this small river to its pre-industrial state to make room for gentrification and other forms of urban development. These efforts have perennially failed. As city planners begin a new round of earnestly exploring how to entomb these animal remains, this talk considers what might be lost if this past was suddenly buried. It instead follows how artists, activists, and athletes are creating communities of value in irremediable landscapes by inhabiting the rhythms of slow decomposition. As part of a broader project on overcoming the legacies of the Chicago Stockyards, it examines these efforts to inhabit Bubbly Creek as exemplars of what it might mean to deindustrialize ecology today.
Alex Blanchette will also give a public talk at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague on Monday, March 13 2023. The talk is co-hosted The BOAR ERC project of The Institute of Ethnology, CAS, Prague and the Fencing the Feral project at Aarhus Univsersity.
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Research workshop organised by the Fencing the Feral Research Project, Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University
Venue: Sandbjerg Estate, Sandbjergvej 102, Sønderborg, Denmark
The last decades have witnessed a proliferation of border fencing across the globe, within the EU alone several hundred kilometres of fences are estimated to have been erected; and more than a thousand kilometres exist separating it from non-EU territories. This tendency is culminating in the recent, hasty construction of border fences by several European countries in order to stem refugee flows, prevent animal born diseases (such as African Swine Fever) from spreading, and to curb the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic.
This workshop will address how fencing relates to larger political narratives of borders, flows and biosecurity. The three-day workshop will not only be an opportunity to share our respective work, but also to develop our ideas into a larger publication on the theme of Fencing and Biosecurity. The workshop will also present an excellent opportunity for new research collaborations and networking and will include field trips to the Danish-German border area.
