Anne Galvin

Preliminary abstract: This project examines the Black River in St. Elizabeth, Jamaica as a socio-ecological form that entangles and shapes the lives of sugar cane and tilapia farmers. The rum industry’s release of effluent into the Black River is at the heart of a legal conflict based on ecological and livelihood based claims to the use of the river, which feeds an effluent effected tilapia farm downstream. This research studies how claims to the river are being shaped by late-industrial forms of knowledge that place rights to livelihood on the part of sugar cane workers in conflict with ecological regulatory standards and downriver aquaculture industries. The research hypothesizes that by framing the dispute as a local moral conflict over labor and environmental protection, affective responses and activism on the part of citizens work to obscure the powerful interests of state actors and transnational industries.