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<h1 class="css-19v093x">Anthropocene Hubris</h1>
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<h2>Precarious Entanglement</h2>
<p>In the Anthropocene—the current terminal
period of neoliberal capitalism marked by
climate change, environmental degradation,
and social-political unraveling—calls to
rethink human life abound. In response, a
powerful subframe of Anthropocene
theory—what we might name “precarious
entanglement” or “dwelling in the ruins”
thinking—forwards one way of doing so. For
proponents of this perspective, the
infrastructures, promises, and aspirations
of modernity are seen as ruins themselves.<span>1</span>
To think otherwise would be to miss the
lessons the Anthropocene holds for us:
modern humanism and attendant ideas of
progress, hubris, and freedom were an error,
and now drive current devastation. Humanity
must, this narrative insists powerfully, be
humble.</p>
<p>“No more agents of history. We all agree on
that,” argues sociologist Bruno Latour,
whose work perhaps most fully fleshes out
this narrative.<span>2</span> Reversing the
modern story of human freedom as a matter of
rising above, separating from, or
hubristically trying to transform the world,
this line of Anthropocene thinking argues
its inverse: that subjection to volatile
earth forces and entanglement amidst ruins
are the real nature of human existence. This
entanglement in
social-ecological-technological relations,
once elided by modern thinking, is not to be
escaped but to be embraced, argues
philosopher Timothy Morton; such loops, he
maintains, are our “fate” and “destiny.”<span>3</span>
Seeing ourselves within complex systems to
which we are bound reveals that rather than
makers of worlds, we are defined by
precarity. Instead of holding on to hope or
dreams of a “happy ending,” we must now
learn to survive, to use anthropologist Anna
Tsing’s terminology, “in capitalist ruins.”<span>4</span>
The perfect image of our new earthbound
existence, Latour says, is the brutal ending
to Béla Tarr’s film <em>The Turin Horse</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the final tempest of the last days of
Earth, father and daughter decide to flee
their miserable shack isolated in the
middle of a desperately parched landscape.
With a sigh of relief, the spectator sees
them finally going away, expecting that
they have at least a chance of escaping
their diet of one potato a day. But then,
through a reversal that is the most
damning sign of our time, a reversal that
I don’t think any other film has dared
show, instead of moving <em>forward</em>
to another land, one of opportunity, full
of great expectations, full of hopes
(remember <em>America America</em>), we
see with horror that they come back,
exhausted, despondent, bound to their
shack, resuming their old even more
miserable life until eventually darkness
envelops them in its shroud.<span>5</span></p>
</blockquote>
<div class="RIL_IMG" id="RIL_IMG_1">
<figure> <img
src="https://pocket-image-cache.com//filters:no_upscale()/https%3A%2F%2Fimages.e-flux-systems.com%2FImage_2_Turin_Horse_copy.jpg%2C2000"
alt="Ending scene from Béla Tarr’s The
Turin Horse, used by Bruno Latour to
illustrate being earthbound. © Másképp
Alapítvány/Cirko Film/The Cinema Guild."
width="470" height="282"> <figcaption>Ending
scene from Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse,
used by Bruno Latour to illustrate being
earthbound. © Másképp Alapítvány/Cirko
Film/The Cinema Guild.</figcaption> </figure>
</div>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s funny how people think a
post-apocalyptic landscape will be
relatively flat socioeconomically. At most
they think there will be small-scale
warlords or Dunbar-scale anarchist
communes. No. There will be deathstar
billionaires with private armies and
narrow-deep tech stacks.<span>9</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Constraining human being to the <em>is—</em>precarious
survival amidst entangled ruins—rather than
the possible contributes, intentionally or
not, to the already-omnipresent sense that
what is, is all that is possible, and
renounces hubris and audacity at a moment
when poor and working-class people seriously
need these qualities.</p>
<h2>Disentanglement and Delinking</h2>
<p>Ultimately, this particular version of
Anthropocene thinking fails to capture many
of the characteristics and possibilities of
the present. By this I do not mean that the
current moment is not marked by
entanglement. On the contrary, defining and
administering life cybernetically in terms
of information, feedback, and
non-equilibrium interconnection—dismantling
the modern subject—has been central to
western neoliberal governance for decades.<span>10</span>
Post-September 11, securing interconnected
critical networks came to be seen as
especially paramount, with American military
analysts like Thomas Barnett dividing the
world into a “functioning core” and a
“non-integrating gap,” the latter defined as
“disconnected from the global economy and
the rule sets that define its stability.”<span>11</span>
“Eradicating disconnectedness,” argued
Barnett in his much-discussed <em>The
Pentagon’s New Map</em>, “therefore
becomes the defining security task of our
age’’<span>12</span> with failure or refusal
to integrate into the global economy and its
rule sets enforceable by military action.</p>
<p>From Lagos to New York, urban planners and
governments have more recently emphasized
connectedness as key to building resilience
to climate change and its effects.<span>13</span>
Originating in cybernetics and ecology in
the 1970s, resilience is both an ontology
and design practice based in systems
thinking, which emphasizes the
interconnectedness of the social,
ecological, and technological.<span>14</span>
Whereas modern forms of administration were
based in city/nature binaries and sought to
eliminate volatility and risk, resilience is
a governance paradigm that welcomes
entanglements, understands instability as
inevitable, and views cities as coupled
social-ecological-technical infrastructural
systems that must develop their capacity for
absorbing turbulence.<span>15</span> In
resilience approaches, entanglement is thus
viewed not only as politically mandatory (as
for early 2000s geopolitics) but also
ontologically natural: a corrective to
erroneous modern ways of thinking.</p>
<p>However, while entanglement is increasingly
celebrated, we are also witness to some of
its opposite. In the United States, one
might observe that there seems to be growing
tendency toward “delinking” or
“islandization” in response to Anthropocene
conditions and events. For example,
politicians promote ever-more securitized
borders and walls as a manipulative solution
to the suffering of working-class people.
The very wealthy detach their stacks and
supply chains, shore up urban networks
against climate change, or disconnect from
the same social media they own, while also
preparing infrastructure for bigger moves in
the future to secure themselves and their
forms of life. This may be seen as the
Anthropocenization of what historian Nils
Gilman calls the plutocratic insurgency that
has been underway for decades; a revolt by
capitalist elites against the confines of
modern postwar territorial power
configurations.<span>16</span> In this
insurgency, the rich seek to detach
themselves legally and infrastructurally
from what Gilman terms “social modernism”:
an ideological and institutional formation
centered around the nation state as a
provider of welfare and economic growth.</p>
<p>Along with off-shore tax havens, Fourth
Industrial Revolution modes of labor
management, and gutting the West’s
working-class and welfarist structures, a
key component of the plutocratic insurgency
is the creation of enclaves like those
documented by Mike Davis.<span>17</span>
“These islands of elitism,” explains Gilman,
“are designed to be largely self-sufficient
in their ability to deliver health care,
food, security, education, entertainment,
etc. to their residents, even as they sit
amid seas of social misery…From the point of
view of the denizens of such communities,
the primary function of the wider society is
to serve as a source of cheap, servile
labor, and as a well of resources to be
looted.”<span>18</span> But gated
communities, Gilman further argues, “are
merely an example of a broader pattern, in
which economic, social, or political
enclaves are carved out of a national state
and enabled to play by a fundamentally
different set of rules from the surrounding
territory.”<span>19</span> Taking this
forward, Kanye West recently floated
“building a fireproof community” after he
and Kim Kardashian hired private
firefighters to save their $60 million
California mansion during the 2018
California wildfires. Meanwhile, the
Seasteading Institute, founded by Milton
Friedman’s grandson and originally funded by
Peter Thiel, is exploring how to set off a
“Cambrian explosion” of autonomous
artificial floating cities starting in the
Pacific Ocean. In the Institute’s eyes,
seasteads are a solution to sea rise as well
as what they see as the domineering
overreach (read: taxation) of existing
governments—a way to “liberate humanity from
politicians.”<span>20</span></p>
<div>
<div>
<div class="RIL_IMG" id="RIL_IMG_2">
<figure> <img
src="https://pocket-image-cache.com//filters:no_upscale()/https%3A%2F%2Fimages.e-flux-systems.com%2FSeasteading_Institute_by_Gabriel_Scheare_Luke_Lourdes_Crowley_and_Patrick_White_High_Res_copy.jpg%2C2000"
alt="As imagined by the Seasteading
Institute and its startup company
Blue Frontiers, autonomous floating
cities will run on solar and wind
power, grow food via aquaculture,
and use desalination as well as
their own cryptocurrency. Artist
Concept: Artisanopolis—Sustainable
Domes and Power-grids. Credit: The
Seasteading Institute and Gabriel
Scheare, Luke & Lourdes Crowley,
and Patrick White" width="678"
height="381"> <figcaption>As
imagined by the Seasteading
Institute and its startup company
Blue Frontiers, autonomous floating
cities will run on solar and wind
power, grow food via aquaculture,
and use desalination as well as
their own cryptocurrency. Artist
Concept: Artisanopolis—Sustainable
Domes and Power-grids. Credit: The
Seasteading Institute and Gabriel
Scheare, Luke & Lourdes Crowley,
and Patrick White</figcaption> </figure>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>These earth governance efforts exist
alongside private space colonization
projects couched as an escape hatch from an
increasingly degraded earth.<span>21</span>
Elon Musk has built and successfully tested
rockets on which SpaceX intends to send
humans to Mars by the mid-2020s (NASA plans
to land astronauts there by 2033) and
predicts beginning colonization as early as
2025. Most Left commentators cynically scorn
such space ventures.<span>22</span> However,
it is understandable how others might see in
them a worthy human venture, one that
current and future generations might find
actually desirable, not least because it
might offer escape from the social carnage
of neoliberalism’s cataclysmic continuation
on earth. There is nothing necessarily wrong
with imagining oneself in the shoes of the
first humans to see Mars’s surface with
their own eyes, descending from a rocket
doorway to touch the planet’s rocky red
crust with their own feet. Just like the
writings of science fiction author Steven
Erikson, commercial space ventures contain
their own poetics: the desire to go where no
human has gone before; find other life; or
sink into the stars at warp speed.<span>23</span></p>
<div>
<div>
<div class="RIL_IMG" id="RIL_IMG_3">
<figure> <img
src="https://pocket-image-cache.com//filters:no_upscale()/https%3A%2F%2Fimages.e-flux-systems.com%2FImage_5_spacex_astronaut_mars.jpg%2C2000"
alt="SpaceX visualization of
Interplanetary Transport System and
the first humans to see Mars. ©
Official SpaceX Photos." width="834"
height="355"> <figcaption>SpaceX
visualization of Interplanetary
Transport System and the first
humans to see Mars. © Official
SpaceX Photos.</figcaption> </figure>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>In the more pragmatic vision of the world’s
on-and-off wealthiest person and <em>Star
Trek</em> fanatic Jeff Bezos, the only way
for poor and working-class people to get to
space will probably be as free labor in one
form or another. As Bezos recently
described, with resources on Earth running
out, “space is the only way to go.” Rather
than colonizing Mars, though, Bezos plans to
build artificial worlds—O’Neill cylinders
rotating to create artificial
gravity—orbiting Earth and able to support
one million people each.<span>24</span> Some
of the cylinders will be agricultural areas
irrigated by drones, while some will be
cities and others more recreational.</p>
<p>“What does architecture even look like when
it no longer has its primary purpose of
shelter?” asks Fred Scharmen.<span>25</span>
Like “Maui on its best day, all year long.
No rain, no storms, no earthquakes,” Bezos
responds. Earth, he envisions, will be
rezoned as a residential and light
industrial zone.<span>26</span> “We send
things up into space but they are all made
on Earth. Eventually it will be much cheaper
and simpler to make really complicated
things, like microprocessors and everything,
in space and then send those highly complex
manufactured objects back down to Earth, so
that we don’t have the big factories and
pollution generating industries that make
those things now on Earth.” And as to the
question of “who is going to do this work?”
Bezos concluded: “not me,” and gestured to a
group of school children in the audience
wearing shirts from the children’s club of
his space company, Blue Origin. “You guys
are going to do this, and your children are
going to do this.”<span>27</span></p>
<h2>Human Agency: A slender air-bridge to the
possible</h2>
<p>It is increasingly important to refute
assertions—both those of governments and
some critical theory narratives—that nothing
else is possible. Both literally and
figuratively, “this” world is actually not
the only world there is. Much is actually
possible. The first grunt labor force sent
to Mars could blow up the return
Starship™—gone Croatan, albeit on the red
planet. Still, beyond contributing to the
present shredding of the social fabric or
desperately flinging oneself against it in
vain, it can be extremely difficult to
imagine what liberation in the Anthropocene
might look like, especially for the poor and
working-class. To say anyone knows the
answers to the unbelievably complex problem
of contemporary neoliberal capitalist
society would be disingenuous. To say that a
preidentified system would provide a better
world seems even more off, especially
considering the outcomes of such projects
throughout the twentieth century. We cannot
imagine what we cannot imagine. If the
emergence of the Anthropocene tells us
anything it is that we need a break with
existing structures and institutions and
ways of thinking, perhaps including ones
that have risen so recently to hegemony in
the epoch’s name.</p>
<p>This need for a break is felt widely.
Eco-cybernetic entanglement, precarity, and
lack of agency are circumstances in which
much of the population lives and not by
choice. Rather than celebrating Anthropocene
conditions, it is worth considering
seriously that an equally descriptive image
of the present is that of the current
order’s structures on fire. This zeitgeist
was well-summarized in political scientists
Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen,
and Kevin Arceneaux’s recent survey, covered
by the <em>New York Times</em> with alarm,
which reported highly affirmative responses
to statements such as: “When I think about
our political and social institutions, I
cannot help thinking ‘just let them all
burn’” (40% agreed); “We cannot fix the
problems in our social institutions, we need
to tear them down and start over” (40%
agreed).<span>28</span></p>
<p>This sentiment is part of the attraction
many Americans have to apocalyptic movies
and TV: the end promises an escape from the
present order. Take, for example, the once
extremely popular TV series <em>The Walking
Dead</em>, which during its golden
age—season 4 (2014)—was the most popular
show for Americans aged 18–49 (15.7 million
people watched the season finale). Episode
“Still” opens with a survival skills montage
of characters Daryl Dixon (grizzled
crossbow-toting fan favorite whose face is
featured on “Don’t Mess with Daryl Dixon”
t-shirts sold at Walmart) and Beth Greene
(blonde, Christian, suburban) collecting
tools, trapping animals, and roasting snake.
Devastated by the recent murder of Beth’s
father and loss of their band of companions,
the pair wander a zombie-ravaged landscape.
Inside an abandoned country club where they
search for bottles of liquor, Daryl
discovers piles of money. Falling to his
knees, he shovels the bills into a duffel
bag, frantically acting on old impulses.
Later, they hole up in an abandoned rural
house. Car parts and old tires litter the
yard. Inside, cigarette butts overflow
plates atop a junk store kitchen table. On
the porch they drink their found moonshine
and share stories from their pasts (while
Beth’s sheltered upbringing is known,
Daryl’s “before” story has until this
episode remained unknown).</p>
<p>“Home sweet home,” says Daryl, reminiscing
to Beth how he grew up in a house just like
this. He recounts how his abusive racist
father would place jumbo, plastic,
bra-shaped ashtrays on the TV and use them
for target practice, sitting in his
underwear drinking in a dumpstered
camouflage La-Z-Boy. “You want to know what
I was before?” he asks Beth. “I was nobody.
Nothing. Some redneck asshole.” “I'm just
used to it, things being ugly. Growing up in
a place like this.” “We should burn it
down,” Beth suggests. Beth too has
experienced great pain and loss and is ready
to leave the past behind in her own ways.
They gather the money they’d
hoarded—valueless now as money anyway—and
the alcohol with which they’d tried to drown
their pain and use them as tinder and fuel
to burn the house down. In an
extraordinarily beautiful scene—which
reverses Latour’s <em>Turin Horse</em>-inspired
vision—Beth and Daryl, their faces lit up by
flames, point their middle fingers at the
ruined house, turn their backs and walk into
the night.</p>
<p>It’s not that a better world awaits ahead,
and the scene is not triumphant. But to
paraphrase Beth, at least you’re not living
how you used to, not anymore. This version
of the apocalyptic is powerful and popular
because it offers a way out of the crushing
hopelessness and the impossibility of
becoming something or someone else that many
poor and working-class people in America
feel. Or at bare minimum, a proper response
to the structures that create these
conditions.</p>
<p>Daryl’s past—represented by the dilapidated
manufactured home—offers an image of the
rural poverty across the American
hinterlands, where unemployment and debt are
extraordinarily high and “deaths of despair”
(suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism) common.<span>29</span>
Far from the spaces of academic theorizing,
such “ruined” places represent the much
broader death of the so-called American
dream, the sum of the post-1970s decades of
revanchism and counterrevolution waged via
deindustrialization, wage cuts, urban
crackdowns, hyperincarceration; all
strategies flanked by a massively increased
wealth gap and soaring profits for the very
wealthy, now augmented by ecosystemic
collapse. Daryl and Beth embody a fictional
response to a certain experience of this.
But such imaginaries only echo larger scale,
real world responses to other, differently
situated experiences which have been
launched in recent years from America’s
impoverished cities and suburbs—such as
Ferguson, Missouri—by humans sick of being
dehumanized by the never-ending police
shootings of African Americans,
ghettoization, and economic precarity.<span>30</span></p>
<p>In spite of theoretical prescriptions to
the contrary, we need ways to pry open the
walls closing in around us (walls around the
imagination, walls between the now and the
future, between peoples). Toward this end,
Alfredo Bonanno once described insurrection
as an air-bridge to the unknown, a
non-rational breaking through the structures
of the present—wage work, for instance—to a
space of the possible in which we might see
in new ways. “A slender air-bridge between
the tools of the past and the dimensions of
the future.”<span>31</span> Rather than
celebrating the ruins or qualities of
entanglement and precarity imposed by
governments and companies, perhaps building
these air-bridges might have something to do
with delinking. This can mean detaching, as
theorist Eva Haifa Giraud suggests, from
structures and situations which strangle us,
to reweave others, according to other
priorities.<span>32</span> Perhaps delinking
as a liberatory—not resentful or
conservative—political matter will also
involve both reconsidering what building
power today means and working towards
freedom as a serious and urgent goal, even
(and especially) as the old orders shred
themselves apart.</p>
<p>Here we might note, in America at least,
the growing normalization of once-outlier
activities amongst growing numbers of
working-class individuals and families.
Examples of this include learning survival
skills, building local infrastructures
(wireless mesh networks, food production,
whether farming or engineering protein bars,
etc.), and taking up physical fitness
regimes.<span>33</span> Such activities are
representative of an increasingly widespread
desire to decrease dependency and take back
some degree of power over one’s life and
abilities—to reappropriate one’s means of
existence, even if the only time to do so is
found during lunch breaks. Yet placed
alongside the scale, vision, and material
means of delinking activities of the world’s
very wealthy and the force they mobilize,
these scattered efforts too often seem to
reflect a <em>powerlessness</em>—an
inability to build real power or
autonomy—rather than the opposite.</p>
<p>Life exigencies and lack of resources often
mean that, at best, such practices result in
an increased preparedness to survive the
next Coronavirus or hurricane (no minor feat
itself of course), in a time where the
definition and horizon of life has become
“normalizing survival.”<span>34</span>
Still, even prepping is often animated by
important questions such as how to help
oneself and others and how to not be hostage
to relief agencies, FEMA camps, or
governments that disdain whole populations.
How to save your family from sleeping on a
gym floor, like the Kims in Bong Joon-ho’s <em>Parasite</em>?
How not to allow oneself to be reduced to
scrounging for the last can of beans at the
panic-ravaged grocery store? How to take
care of oneself and one’s own
communities—the things and beings you love?
Such questions are a pragmatic and
existential matter of refusing to be
dependent on corporations and algorithms.
Addressing them also opens up much broader
horizons.</p>
<div>
<div>
<div class="RIL_IMG" id="RIL_IMG_4">
<figure> <img
src="https://pocket-image-cache.com//filters:no_upscale()/https%3A%2F%2Fimages.e-flux-systems.com%2FMinneapolis_Police_Department_s_3rd_Precinct_2020_05_28.jpg%2C2000"
alt="Protesters overtake and burn
the Minneapolis Police" width="474"
height="316"> <figcaption>Protesters
overtake and burn the Minneapolis
Police's 3rd Precinct Station. Photo
by Hungryogrephotos, May 28, 2020.</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>As the Anthropocene progresses, will
emancipatory trajectories of delinking take
shape at a comparative scale and depth of
power to those of the planet’s ruling
classes? Will the epoch be marked by a
widespread movement of peoples delinking
from dehumanizing structures to create
other, rich, unbounded territories, ones
infrastructurally and subjectively capable
of deciding how to live on their own terms?
Using recent work by geographers on the
concept, “territory” here might be thought
of less in terms of a two-dimensional
bounded area and instead as heterogenous,
emergent assemblages on land or sea;
powerful “volumina” made of their own
technologies of living, ways of moving,
geopowers, and relations with humans and
nonhumans.<span>35</span> Although it is an
antagonistic concept, “territory,”
philosopher Elizabeth Grosz writes, is also
“artistic, the consequence of love not war,
of seduction not defense.”<span>36</span></p>
<p>It’s impossible to know in advance whether
this would lead to more livable futures. But
surely exploring the possibility offers a
more promising direction than affirming
precarious entanglement and abdicating human
hubris to the rich. Delinking and relinking
on one’s own terms are not techniques that
conservative forces monopolize. However
difficult it may be to explore this
direction, given that most lack a financial
or territorial base to begin from, it seems
crucial to build material power. But then
again, maybe some zoomer will say this is an
antiquarian modality; that more power can be
found enmeshed in ethereal flows accessible
alone in one’s bedroom on a laptop (whether
using Google or Tor). For some this might be
unacceptable or at least not enough, but
that doesn’t make it wrong.</p>
<p>Precarity-entanglement thinking recognizes
something important about the Anthropocene:
we require new ways of thinking and living.
But the task of thought should never be to
instruct others in how to live, to provide
universals to define life, or to flank
governmental assertions that “nothing else
is possible” other than the resilient
continuation of existing structures while
the world burns and floods. Taking the claim
that old world is ending seriously opens up
much broader horizons. The end of the “one
world world”—or what I call the
Anthropocene’s “back loop”—is not the time
for reasserting new universal definitions
for what life should be, but for reaching
out into the infinite range of what we and
others might make it.<span>37</span> Just as
scholars such as Clive Barnett and Stephen
Collier have argued against reductive or
ontologizing critiques of government, so too
is there a need for critical Anthropocene
thinking to resist this approach.<span>38</span></p>
<p>Acknowledging that the world is not there
“for us,” that the earth has its own
intractable forces and autonomy, need not
require as its corollary to sink into
self-hatred or disavowal of human
capacities. Surely there are other
possibilities beyond this false binary that
some versions of Anthropocene thinking
tether human being to. As Chandler suggests
“perhaps it is a false and forced choice to
choose between ‘the human’ and ‘the world’?
Perhaps rethinking modernity does not
necessarily involve the refutation of any
possibility of political alternatives other
than those based on accepting our newfound
fragility and vulnerability?”<span>39</span></p>
<p>At a time when human power and hubris have
become objects of disdain for some, it is
important to insist on its critical
importance in the Anthropocene. One could
look back to a vast and varied range of
hubristic human efforts, with some
dominating nature or oppressing populations
and others embodying collective struggles
for freedom. But emancipatory struggle is
not an object of remembrance. Rather, it is
a basic human need elaborated in ever-new
ways. Thus, it is fitting and appropriate
that the 2010s opened and closed with global
waves of anti-government uprisings (although
resistance at the decade’s close was notably
subdued in the US). What’s needed now is a
hubris proper to both the Anthropocene and
the subjects trying to escape from it.
Without such a hubris, without the embrace
of profound experimentation with existence,
we cede the future and our lives to the
billionaires and petty warlords, technocrats
and politicians.</p>
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<p><em>Accumulation</em> is sponsored by the
PhD Program in Architecture at the
University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School
of Design.</p>
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<p><strong>Stephanie Wakefield</strong>
researches human-environment relations,
urban resilience, and social-ecological
systems thinking. She is an Urban Studies
Foundation International Postdoctoral
Research Fellow at Florida International
University.</p>
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