PhD Candidate, University of Chicago
Contributor, Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
Research Interests
Anthropology of water | Climate Change | Decolonization | Environments | experimental and interventionist ethnographic methods | Experimental Ethnography | Feminism | Futures | Multimodality | Place | Property |
About Hannah
Hannah Eisler Burnett is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation research examines how plans for ecosystem restoration in the Mississippi River Delta affect coastal communities, and the different histories that inform these projects and how they are understood. She has also collaborated on various art and video projects related to themes of water, toxicity, global trade, and capital.
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Contributions to Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
View all of Hannah's posts on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.
Cargo Ships and Comrades: On the Occasion of the Beached Ever Given
In 2018, we took a cargo ship from Barcelona to New York City and made a short film called Slop Chest about the blurry distinction between work and leisure when you live where you work—and can’t leave. Here, we describe some of our experiences on board, drawing resonances between the labor practices in international shipping and in Amazon’s warehouses. Writing while the cargo ship Ever Given is blocking all trade through the Suez Canal and while Amazon employees in Bessemer, Alabama, are preparing to count votes in favor of unionization, we speculate about how these two events resonate. What are contours of this conjuncture? There are three separate crews on board our ship: the officers, the engineers, and the deck crew who are responsible for maintaining the ship and keeping watch. The captain is Polish and the officers are similarly white and eastern European. The engineers are mostly the same, (read more...)