CHR Fellow Talk: PhD Candidate Blake Vullo (Sociology and Anthropology), "Between Privilege and Precarity: Environmental Change, Land Use Change and Suburbanization in the United States"

Wednesday, March 27, 2024 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EDT
Hybrid Event in Horizon Hall 6325 and on Zoom

Blake's research seeks to provide a sociological examination of the relationships between suburban housing development, urbanization, and land-use intensification within the United States. Coming to understand the economic, political, and socio-environmental drivers that influence land-use intensification—as this project seeks to do with regard to suburban housing development and urbanization—is paramount to the discipline of sociology, an interdisciplinary body of scholarship, and a transdisciplinary body of researchers and communities that aim for the equitable co-production of sustainable land systems. It should be noted that features of suburban housing development and relative population growth within rural, suburban, and urban regions of the U.S. are not entirely unique phenomena to this nation-state alone; that is, as suburban housing development has no signs of slowing down globally, this project seeks to problematize claims from seemingly disparate bodies of scholarship that maintains there exists a useful application of what is known as the “town-country” divide into socio-environmental dimensions of land-use and land-use intensification. While this project intends to employ an inductive approach to provide something resembling an answer to the questions it raises, forms of disposability and perceptions of repair are exceedingly present with regard to this particular topic of suburbanization as a site of land-use intensification. There are lasting vestiges of the historical, and blatant reminders of the contemporary, claims-making processes—as well as forms of spectacle—that have overwhelmingly relied upon discursive arrangements and formations that have attempted to minimize understanding about the rates of extraction, the fractionalized handlings of “true” ecological costs, and to displace commonly held feelings of precarity that undergird this particular type of social and housing arrangement.