Composing this research essay came at the end of a grueling semester and a less-than-satisfying experience working as an intern for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. That is to say, an air of exhaustion potentially marks my essay. Following my initial investigation into the 2003 blackout, the history of the US energy system, and the New York City water system, I realized I bit off a bit more than I could chew. For one, the more localized impacts of the 2003 blackout were not always directly addressed or weren’t until several years later — it took a lot of circling back to piece information together coherently…READ MORE.

Amidst the grim reality of the over 200-day siege on the Gaza Strip, in which roughly half of the 2.3 million residents are forcibly displaced to the southernmost city, Rafah, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now mobilized troops for a potentially imminent ground invasion. Rafah, a city home to approximately 275,000 residents before October 7th, lies along the southern border of the Gaza Strip, adjacent to Egypt, separated by the expanse of the arid, barren Sinai Desert. As Israel’s bombardment has moved from the North towards the South, over a million Gazans have fled to Rafah, where instead, they were met with failing infrastructures, lack of aid, starvation, and a primarily inaccessible border crossing… READ MORE.

As the largest megacity in Africa, urban scholars often turn to Lagos, Nigeria as a cornerstone for developing theories on modern and future urbanism. Decoding an honest, historically contextualized ethos of Lagos has proved to be the task of the century, one in which traditional Western urban theoretical approaches have continuously fallen short. Dutch architect and urban theorist Roy Koolhaas’s research work in Lagos with the Harvard’s Project on The City, as described in the documentary film “Lagos/Koolhaas",” and his subsequent literature, exemplify these shortcomings for their binary, flattening conclusions…READ MORE.

In her essay Women of Color, Environmental Justice, and Ecofeminism, Dorceta Taylor prompts a reconsideration of the biases, scales, and modes through which environmental justice is conceptualized and put into practice. From the surface, a cemetery does not have any apparent connections to environmental justice or racism, but it was precisely this challenge of articulating the more remote links that interested me. Last semester, I frequently passed by the Green-Wood Cemetery of Sunset Park while going to my internship at the New York City SIMS municipal recycling recovery facility (SMR), where I became interested in tracing the social, political, and environmental links to the urban geography of the neighborhood…READ MORE.

In her work 'Purity and Danger', Anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that conceptions of dirt and contagion contribute to structuring who and what exists in the inner or outer realms of social and political power. Her ideas lay the foundation for later assertions about the power of abjection beyond eliciting negative feelings and associations. Although Douglas’s work is conclusively reductive and limited, particularly in describing what even constitutes waste, her ideas build up an understanding of waste as a complex interlocutor of power– positively reinforcing social orders through the negation of the abject…READ MORE.

In Donna Haraway’s “Playing SF With Companion Species” from Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene SF is a multidimensional term, in part meaning string figures. To Haraway, string figures are more than a childhood game, string figures also serve as a metaphorical framework integral to her exploration of the interconnectedness of humans, animals, and technology in a posthuman world. String figures bridge together the other abbreviated ideas encapsulated in “SF,” including science fiction, speculative feminism, science fiction, speculative fabulation, and science fact…READ MORE.

In the past 15 years, the AMC television series The Walking Dead has become one of the most successful shows in American history, enamoring audiences with its portrayal of a post-apocalyptic America overrun by zombies. At peak popularity, The Walking Dead captivated an unprecedented “15-17 million same-day viewers on a weekly basis,” a clear testament to the show’s engrossing and also grotesque storyline (Kennedy). The show’s graphic depiction of violence and gore within a dystopian world where morality is ambiguous, and survival is paramount serves a deeper commentative purpose than just offering viewers entertainment. The eagerness of the millions who tuned in each week to watch the show’s brutal and often disturbing events arguably suggests a deep and increasing cultural fascination with American-apocalyptic speculation.…READ MORE.