Water Justice Activism: Materiality and Metaphor

This paper examines how race and gender shape water justice activism in Flint Michigan and the Central Valley region of California. By putting two different case studies together- one a largely rural agricultural and Latino population region facing agricultural runoff, and the other a deindustrializing city with a large African American population, I hope to trace how gendered and racialized environmental justice activism is structurally connected and distinct, in order to understand how to think more analytically about histories of activism, and how action crosses time and space. I am particularly interested in water as both infrastructure/ lived materiality, and metaphor- for boundary crossing and transgression of the private and public sphere. I will focus on gendered visual representations of water pollution and activism.