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This visualization and caption advances ethnographic insight by being a sort of archive of both the afterlives of the Buick City brownfield site, and the Flint water crisis. The blank snow represents the dual challenges of picturing the movement of toxicants under and through the earth and water, and the fence of building the local relationships which facilitate processes of not just environmental remediation, but also the private barriers between corporations and community building and engagement in late industrial landscapes.

The caption can be elaborated further to discuss how any of the contaminants found on the site are more closely connected to the nearby river, to the Flint water crisis, and to other forms of everyday toxicity encountered by residents in the community (ex. would groundwater from the site leach into the river?_ If, as the author mentions, the site has become a symbol for local revival efforts, what notions of “environment” and “clean-up” are projected onto it and what kind of politics are these concepts connected to?

This created image has a powerful composition, where the blurred lines of a fence frame an image of a snowy field, with a water tower in the distance. The snow is provokative, as it hides the ground underneath, and belies the degree of contamination of the site. At the same time, the forest in the distance seems to abruptly stop, which gives the viewer a clue that something is impacting the land in the foreground.

This image might be enriched by adding a comparison with the original Buick City, or some form of juxtaposition of the current site and what used to be on the site. An option might be to include images of remediation testing which is periodically undergone on brownfield sites, or to include aerial images of the site immediately after Buick City was removed, when the presence of particular contaminants might have been most obvious on the surface.

The visualization shows how intensities of toxic contamination are treated as exceptions, and as “sites” to be remediated, rather than as sources of contamination which can migrate into water systems, the atmosphere, and into many lifeforms. It raises important questions about the consequences of scales of attention paid to places of the highest concentrations of contamination, rather than other distributions of toxicity which impact the surrounding community.

This image of a storm water outflow underlies the way toxicity travels - a toxic “site” or “place” is never fully static, rippling and flowing in sometimes unexpected ways. National stories on Flint have so often focused on certain imagery (pipes, sinks and bathtubs filled with brown water), so it’s fascinating to see how toxicity in this context constitutes much broader social and ecological ecosystems. 

Based off the graffiti in this image, I wonder - who travels near the storm drain? Where is it located in relation to the city of Flint? Does any graffiti refer to the water crisis or other issues you describe?

Unclear, although I assume it is created by the ethnographer. It’s centering of the drain, which lies under some kind of road or overpass, seems to underline the forgotten nature of the pathways of chemical toxicity. (Especially in relation to the first image, whose depiction of the former factory site also feels lonely and abandoned). The choice of season also enhances this aesthetic, depicting the landscape as barren in a particular way.

I really appreciate the historical contextualization provided in the choice of visualizations and captions here. It almost seems to write against spectacle... or at least, its general privileging in discourses on toxicity and disaster. Slow violence is certainly relevant here, although I don't feel like that fully encompasses the phenomemon you're getting at in Flint. 

This picture visualises the opposition, but also the close proximity and inseperabability of the 'natural' river environment and channels of toxic industrial waste. It brings to the centre a storm water drain that may be easily overlooked otherwise.