Ayluonne Txai Tereszkiewicz

AYLUONNE TERESZKIEWICZ, then a graduate student at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, was approved funding in September 2023 to aid research on “Remediating the Plantation: Superfund Legacies and Gullah Geechee Heritage in Navassa, North Carolina,” supervised by Dr. João Biehl. Through the grant duration of January 2024 – January 2025, the grantee investigated acts of “repair” to the U.S. Southern landscape, spotlighting three reparative processes unfolding across one county in Southeastern North Carolina: a Land Conservation Easement, an E.P.A. Superfund Remediation, and the historical restoration of a Black Gullah Geechee chapel. Through a twelve-month apprenticeship with a local land trust involved in each practice, the grantee trained under active practitioners and community participants. Engaging in both physical and analytical labor, the grantee recorded the material and discursive worlds of conservation, remediation, and restoration. Specifically, the research observed how practitioners within each of these processes chose to delineate the landscape’s ‘wilderness’, toxicity, and cultural heritage, and how — in turn — they presented and debated the meanings of place-based harm, repair, and justice. The dissertation will highlight how those modes of “participatory repair” are unique democratic acts: they reframe foundational questions about the moral and ethical obligations communities have to shared histories and land.