Infrastructuring text:
"Moreover, as demonstrated by Feldman [18] when looking at the use of resources from an organizational perspective, as people’s practices change, so do the ways in which they use resources. To this effect, the use of resources, such as materials and information, is contextual, their meaning and use changes depending on the situation." → Ovens become heaters when people face routine disruptions after losing heat. NEC offices, where an individual may only go to for foodstamps or food pantries, or for other social services, may become an energy office to them when they are facing a shut off.
"Given that the infrastructures that people draw on during prolonged disruptive life events can be damaged and/or serve as further sources of disruption and marginalization, we believe people can work around these issues is by relying on alternative infrastructures, repurposing existing infrastructures, or building new infrastructures, as a means for developing resilience."
Maintenance text:
"Rehabilitation efforts funded by the World Bank and IMF reflect a “tendency for neglected maintenance expenditures to be capitalized through ‘new build’ projects.” Maintenance is thus entangled with plans to open or protect access to markets or resources."
"All of the incentives for all the actors are against maintenance. Nobody ever named a maintenance project, nobody ever got recognized for a maintenance project, nobody ever much got blamed for deferring maintenance during the time while they were in office."
Slow Emergencies Text:
"The concept of slow emergencies points to those situations of harm and suffering that question what forms of life can and should be secured by Emergency governance. It helps translate un- or barely-bearable conditions inseparable from ordinariness into something demanding urgent action. A slow emergency is thus marked by the disjuncture between an emergency claim and the racializing assemblages (Weheliye 2014) that structure which subjects may claim a future in need of protection” → the experience of energy vulnerability as a slow emergency because the experience falls along lines of racial assemblages
"On the other hand, liberal order governs through emergency in the sense that claims to an emergency - sometimes strategic declarations that an emergency has happened, is happening or will happen - can justify actions that (re)order bodies and relations for pre-existing reasons"
“In a ‘state of emergency’ visible impacts and effects of power manifest in and through bodies, typically framed in terms of the production of ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998). Research into racial violence following Hurricane Katrina (Braun and McCarthy 2005) and the 2010 Haiti earthquake (Mullings et al 2010), for instance, shows how action in a state of emergency draws on and reproduces black disaster victims as disposable lives (Giroux 2006) while pursuing a goal of sustaining the existing socioecological order.” → relates to COVID-19 emergency declarations, and how “essential worker” category reinforced the disposability of often low-income, health vulnerable bodies.
"More recently, geographers and other critical theorists have turned to concepts including ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2011) and ‘slow death’ (Berlant 2011) to examine how racially and economically uneven processes of environment (in)justice fold harm, suffering, risk and premature death into the fabric of everyday life, particularly among poor and marginalized communities. Taken together, this and other research highlights that emergency is not only a dry juridical category, but signals a form of life structured through biopolitical techniques and mechanisms of racialization that delimit what lives can and should be exposed to banal forms of exceptional violence."
"Whether deforestation (Nixon 2011), or the cumulative wearing down of marginalized peoples by repeated ordinary acts of police violence (Fassin 2011), the forms of gradual change and indeterminate presence that characterize slow emergencies means that they sit uncomfortably with the genres that organize what is felt and attended to as an event and thus target of Emergency governance.” → deteriorating of homes in redlined neighborhoods in Philly is gradual, and has an indeterminate presence to external forces.
" situations become slow emergencies through projects by publics, artists and activists that attempt to make situations of attritional lethality into events that demand some form of urgent response. Emergency claims function, then, by opening up an ‘interval’ (Anderson 2015) in which action can make a difference, even as the risk remains that present harms and damages will continue or even intensify. Often, emergency claims or statements are rejected, ignored, or greeted with indifference precisely because of who makes them, how, and to whom. A slow emergency often involves, then, the non- or mis-recognition of a situation of emergent harm or damage, mediated through racialized techniques and procedures that produce that mis- or non-recognition"
"As emergencies are governed, the hope remains that the nonemergency everyday can be returned to. Ways of governing through emergencies are, then, founded upon the geo-historically specific distinction between the everyday and the emergency – a distinction that has only ever been available to some forms of life."
