Book talk with Nicole Fabricant: Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore - in conversation with Lawrence T. Brown

Abstract:

Industrial toxic emissions on the South Baltimore Peninsula are among the highest in the United States. Because of the concentration of factories and other chemical industries in their neighborhoods, residents face elevated rates of lung cancer and other respiratory illnesses in addition to heart attacks, strokes, and cardiovascular disease, all of which can lead to premature death. Nicole Fabricant’s new book Fighting to Breathe follows a dynamic and creative group of high school students who decided to fight back against the race- and class-based health disparities and inequality in their city. For more than a decade, student organizers stood up to unequal land use practices and the proposed construction of an incinerator and instead initiated new waste management strategies. As a Baltimore resident and activist-scholar, Fabricant documents how these young organizers came to envision, design, and create a more just and sustainable Baltimore.

In this event, Dr Fabricant will discuss Fighting to Breathe in conversation with the Baltimore-based Afrofuturist scholar and activist Lawrence T. Brown, who is the author of The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America.

Biographies

Nicole Fabricant is a socio-cultural anthropologist who teaches at Towson University in Maryland.

For the past several years, Dr. Fabricant has been developing a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project that investigates structural injustices in Curtis Bay, South Baltimore. Towson University students have assembled small research collectives and worked collaboratively with youth to document the multiple layers of industrial toxicity, and the cumulative effects upon residents’ health and well-being. Dr. Fabricant has also conducted extensive research on the cultural politics of resource wars in Latin America. Her first book and early publications centered on the Landless Peasant Movement (MST-Bolivia) a 50,000-member social movement comprised of displaced peasants, informal laborers, and intellectuals fighting for land redistribution and the revitalization of small-scale farming.

Lawrence T. Brown is a writer, speaker, scholar, Afrofuturist, and research scientist in the Center for Urban Health Equity at Morgan State University.  Dr. Brown is the author of The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America (2021, John Hopkins University Press) and the creator of the Black Butterfly Dream Lab. The Dream Lab starts with Urban Cipher: An Afrofuturist Learning Game. The board game is a creative way to unpack how space is influenced by race in Baltimore City. The workshop that follows the game reveals how we can make Black neighborhoods matter.