Reed Elizabeth McConnell

ABSTRACT SUBMITTED: During my year of Wenner-Gren funded research, I lived in the small town of Bombay Beach, California, as my main field site. Bombay Beach is located on the shores of the Salton Sea—between the Imperial and Coachella Valleys—and from Bombay Beach, I conducted a packed schedule of participant observation with the four main roughly-delineated groups of interlocutors described in my application: 1. year-round, longtime Bombay Beach residents (mostly poor white retirees); 2. tourists who visit Bombay Beach, members of the town’s growing seasonal artist community, and “Martian” participants in the local Mars College skill-sharing school, all drawn by Bombay Beach’s ruins; environmental justice (EJ) activists in the Imperial and Coachella Valleys; and policymakers, industry representatives, government bureaucrats, and other local powerbrokers. I also conducted forty in-depth, open-ended interviews, collected my own archive of (mostly post-apocalyptic) media shot in the area for later formal analysis, and conducted archival research at seven archives. My preliminary findings are that in Imperial Valley, disastrous futures are often capitalized upon as opportunities by those concretely contributing to the reproduction of the settler colonial order; however, some EJ groups are offering a glimmer of a different, more just order of things.