Job Talk / Elena Sobrino - Infrastructures of Altruism in the Flint Water Crisis

This talk details how ideologies of community and family altruism are shaping water access in the midst of the Flint water crisis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Flint, Michigan, this talk identifies the quotidian welfare and labor practices that are upheld by crisis-driven configurations of care.

Elena Sobrino is a Martin Fellow for Sustainability at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is an anthropologist of science and technology who studies the intersection of racial capitalism and environmental crisis in the postindustrial American midwest. Her current project ethnographically interrogates concepts of crisis in Flint, Michigan, and her second project explores the racial and environmental legacies of midcentury modernist design.