Tianna Bruno | Archival Encounters: Writing on Black Ecological Memory

Abstract: The traditional archival record has long been critiqued for the absence of depictions of Black life. Moreover, notions of Black livingness in sites of climate and environmental injustice, often known as “sacrifice zones” are often limited. Port Arthur, Texas is in many ways a “classic” example of one of these sites as this predominantly Black community is nestled within one of the world’s largest oil refining networks. It is also often in a state of recovery from intense hurricane events as it sits along the U.S. Gulf Coast. In this talk, I intervene in the normative archival record of Port Arthur through creative archival methods. I collaborate with community partners to co-develop this archival intervention that aims to foreground Black life and relationships to place and environment over time in Port Arthur. These methods include building a community-based oral history database, creating and installing a historical marker, and integrating environmental records. 

About the Speaker

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Dr. Tianna Bruno is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Berkeley. Her research focuses on environmental justice, Black environmental geographies, critical physical geography, political ecology, Black spatial and ecological relationships, dendrochronology, and environmental records. Through her work, shes aims to foreground Black life, sense of place, and relationships to the environment within spaces of present-day environmental injustice. Her research also highlights the mutual experiences of degradation and survival between subaltern communities and their surrounding ecologies through the integration of Black geographies and critical physical geography, specifically analyzing trees. This research is currently focused on Texas, and will soon expand to various sites across the Black diaspora. Professor Bruno's work has been published in Local Environment, Professional Geographer, and the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.
 

This Workshop is sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and made possible by support from an anonymous donor, former Fellows, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society.