Chloe Ahmann - "Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore" - Joseph Masco

Chloe Ahmann will discuss Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore. She will be joined in conversation by Joseph Masco. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

At the CO-OP

RSVP HERE (Please note that your RSVP is requested but not required.)

About the Book: 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.

About the Author: Chloe Ahmann (Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell) is an environmental anthropologist studying the long afterlife of American industry. Her current work is based in Baltimore, where she follows industrialism’s enduring traces in toxified landscapes, patchy regulation, quotidian expressions of white supremacy, and particular orientations toward time. She is especially interested in what kinds of environmental futures take form amid these legacies. Ahmann currently works as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell, but before that she was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago, where she also did her undergraduate degree. And before that she was born and raised in Maryland. Her first job was teaching first graders in the neighborhood where this book is set, in South Baltimore City.

About the Interlocutor: Joseph Masco is Samuel N. Harper Professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences in the College and a fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT). He is author of The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making (Duke University Press, 2021), The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Duke University Press, 2014), and The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (Princeton University Press, 2006).