"A Slow Moving Hurricane": Infrastructures of Environmental Racism in the South Carolina Lowcountry

Bio:

Brian Walter is a Ph.D. Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research and teaching interests bring together environmental anthropology, critical heritage studies, political ecology, and environmental justice. Brian’s current project explores how the impacts of climate-change-driven sea-level rise are compounded and racialized by infrastructure and heritage preservation in the South Carolina Lowcountry. He uses spatial and ethnographic methods to follow how floodwaters from sea-level rise interact with remnants of the plantation, as an ecological and political formation maintained through policy, heritage preservation, and natural conservation. In his multi-sited ethnography, Brian examines how water is channeled by hard and soft infrastructures in neighborhoods, plantation wildlife preserves, and other spaces where global climate change and water infrastructure become entangled with what Saidiya Hartman calls the afterlife of slavery. He conducts this research in collaboration with community groups advocating for equitable flood mitigation with whom he is still actively engaged. His work has been published in The Journal of Rural Studies and Columbia Books on Architecture of the City’s Avery Shorts. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Geographic Society, and other organizations.