Speaker: Associate Professor Alison Kenner
Abstract
The home can be thought of as a central node situated at the intersection of public-private infrastructures that include building stock, zoning laws, energy grids, lead pipes, and transportation systems among other sociomaterialities. As such, the home is a nexus of infrastructural vulnerability, which will be made more complicated -- most likely worse -- by climate change. This talk describes a Philadelphia-based project designed to address such vulnerability. Climate Ready Philly experiments with the idea of the ‘climate-ready home’, a paradigm used in Australian and U.S. contexts in various ways -- sometimes used to sell energy efficiency technologies, in other cases as a vulnerability index in policy arenas, and in still other contexts, to prompt households think about emergency preparedness. In Philadelphia, the climate-ready home paradigm has been used in community-based workshop and municipal planning meetings to discuss how legacy infrastructure produces different kinds of vulnerabilities. The project is designed to ask how existing carescapes might be reinvigorated by climate change in ways that open up possibilities for housing justice.
About the Speaker...
Alison Kenner is an associate professor of Politics and a faculty member in the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Drexel University. Her research and teaching focus on environmental health problems in the United States, including the asthma epidemic, climate change, and urban development. Her first book, Breathtaking: Asthma Care in a Time of Climate Change (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) examined how the asthma epidemic is tackled as an environmental problem using personal technologies, environmental education, and embodied knowledge of air quality. Her new book project, Made Vulnerable: Exposed Infrastructures and Politicized Futures, looks at urban redevelopment in present-day Philadelphia, and highlights issues such as vacancy, lead contamination, flooding and green infrastructure, and gentrification. She established the Philadelphia Health and Environment Ethnography Lab in 2014 to support student research, community engagement, and partnerships with local organizations. The Lab is a partner on a transnational air quality project funded by the National Science Foundation. Kenner is also the PI for Climate Ready Philly (climatereadyphilly.org), a community-based climate education workshop series hosted in neighborhoods across the city.