Elena Kylstra Peterman

In recent decades, the Cape Fear River Basin has played host to staggeringly high concentrations of forever chemicals, both legacy and emergent, as well as intensive capital investment and spatial rearrangements in a growing North Carolina. In a scene of largely optimistic transformation, my project asks how presumed entitlement to health, property, and political inclusion among white North Carolinians is unsettled, or perhaps revealed as always already compromised, by encroaching toxicants. This project examines expressions of ambivalent political desire occasioned by exposures to forever chemicals: desires for a robustly protective state on the one hand, and desires for the diminution of political obligation in pursuit of privatized flourishing on the other. Taking forever chemical pollution less as a stable object of inquiry and more as a prism through which to examine shifting political worlds in a small corner of the U.S. South, this project asks: how do encounters with forever chemicals variously derange or reinforce racialized regimes of property and citizenship? And how do people contend with durability— as chemical and material property, as quality of sociopolitical arrangements— in worlds of climatic and political instability?