Job Talk / Saudi Garcia - Sensing Cianuro: Mining Toxicity and the Radical Politics of Bio-geo-social Health in a Dominican Mining Zone

Saudi Garcia is a PhD candidate at the New York University Department of Anthropology. She is an ethnographer of environmental toxicity, chronic illness and technoscience in the Dominican Republic. Her dissertation, titled “Unearthing Blackness: Race, Mining Toxicity and Bio-Geo Social Health in the Dominican Republic,” examines the post-colonial, spatial and racial politics of mining and environmental health in the island of Hispaniola/Ayiti. Her work is grounded in the Afro-Caribbean embodied experience of gold mining tailing dam toxicity and resource conflict among Black Dominican and Haitian farmers in the lower Cibao Valley’s mining zone. Saudi’s research forwards a Black feminist and abolitionist analytic to understand how racialization, geology and climate change are shaping everyday bio-cultural practices and forms of knowledge production in disturbed agrarian ecologies. Her writings can be found in Small Axe, The CASTAC Blog, The Lancet Journal of Public Health and the Border of Lights Reader. In addition to her academic research, Saudi is a facilitator with the decolonial public education collective In Cultured Company and an environmental justice, racial equity and liberation facilitator with the workplace Diversity and Inclusion organization OAAARS. Labor practices that are upheld by crisis-driven configurations of care.