Chloe Ahmann's book, Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore, was selected as one of two honorable mentions for the Julian Steward Book Award. The Anthropology & Environment Society of American Anthropological Association (AAA) awards the Julian Steward Award annually for the best monograph in environmental & ecological anthropology.
The selection committee said the following at the awards ceremony held at the AAA annual meeting in November in Tampa, FL:
"Through detailed, long-term observation, the author constructs a meticulous ethnography of what it means to be born, grow up, and die in a heavily contaminated post-industrial urban environment. The book reveals how the harms of industrialization are not only unevenly borne by racialized bodies but also extend across generations, permeating all kinds of relationships—structural and personal, chemical and ethical."
Futures after Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore is available through The University of Chicago Press. It is also available open-access thanks to a TOME grant from the Cornell Library. In Futures after Progress, anthropologist Chloe Ahmann explores the rise and fall of industrial lifeways on this edge of the city and the uncertainties that linger in their wake. Writing from the community of Curtis Bay, where two hundred years of technocratic hubris have carried lethal costs, Ahmann also follows local efforts to realize a good future after industry and the rifts competing visions opened between neighbors.
Chloe Ahmann is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell. Professor Ahmann is a historical and environmental anthropologist studying how people politicize “impure” environments in the long afterlife of American industry.
