Living With Crisis: Family, Labor, and Environment in Flint, Michigan

In 2014, residents of a small American city were exposed to dangerous levels of lead and bacteria in the drinking water supply and forced to grapple with long-term harm to their health and water infrastructure. The Flint water crisis, as this event became known, transpired in a majority Black municipality in the American midwestern Rust Belt. Flint has a long history of powerful union and civil rights movements but is now notorious for high unemployment rates, blighted neighborhoods, and an eroded tax base and population. Living with Crisis: Family, Labor, and Environment in Flint, Michigan examines the Flint water crisis as the precipitate of multiple ongoing crises in the region. These crises called forth efforts to salvage, redefine, or dissolve various social, economic, and ecological relationships following the exit of the automobile industry in the last decades of the twentieth century from its once dominant role in subsidizing civic life in Flint. This dissertation traces how the resulting shifts in power carried over into everyday struggles in the uneven fallout of the water crisis, a crisis which has been indefinite and resistant to closure. The water crisis was profoundly shaped by the paternalist policy landscape of Michigan at the time, most notably cuts in state revenue sharing and the implementation of emergency management. The overlap of these two policies produced a scarcity in which Flint residents effectively had no democratic decision-making power over city budgets and infrastructure. Emergency management approached financial distress as a justification for takeover by unelected professionals with no accountability to residents. This system disproportionately disciplined majority Black municipalities like Flint without addressing the root causes of income and racial inequality. This dissertation shows how Flint residents made sense of the conditions that led to the water crisis and made their own definitions of economic security and wellbeing by referring to values of reciprocity. Concepts of debts both moral and financial came out of norms, histories, and relationships within churches, families, nested levels of government, corporations, and unions. Between 2019 and 2021, I lived in Flint and conducted fieldwork with a wide range of interlocutors from churches, neighborhood groups, volunteers at bottled water distributions, the United Auto Workers union, local academics, and activists. Juxtaposed together, their stories offered a composite picture of crises in social infrastructure, labor, and environment. At the same time, residents had compelling reasons to be skeptical of external evaluations of Flint that were one-dimensionally negative. Portrayals of decline and ruin fed authoritarian modes of governance and engendered feelings of distance and pity that positioned Flint as an object of charity and extraction simultaneously. This dissertation argues that in a context oversaturated with conflicting meanings of crisis, effects of the water crisis that may seem wholly disempowering, such as widespread sentiments of distrust and fatigue, are in fact important aspects of living with crisis that many residents believe merit attention, not simply elimination. By focusing on local struggles to balance recognition of harm against unwanted stigmatization, this dissertation argues for understanding acts of resistance and acts of survival as integrated rather than oppositional political practices.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Sobrino, Elena

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Walley, Christine

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/151293

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/151293