Chloe Ahmann, "Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

May 4, 2025

Chloe Ahmann, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, dives into the complex history of pollution in South Baltimore. She discusses the enduring effects of industrial decay and local activism aimed at creating a sustainable future. The conversation highlights generational divides in aspirations, revealing how nostalgia shapes community narratives. Ahmann also explores the intertwining themes of hope and despair among residents, emphasizing youth-led movements that seek to combat environmental injustices and envision a brighter tomorrow.

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ANECDOTE

Author's Personal Connection to Curtis Bay

Chloe Ahmann started working in Curtis Bay by teaching first graders near a large coal terminal, directly witnessing pollution's impact.
Her decade-long research deeply connects with community struggles against industrial pollution and uncertain futures.

INSIGHT

Challenges of Slow Violence Activism

Slow violence from pollution is harder to organize against due to its invisible, gradual harm.
Yet activism can create events to reveal these harms and resist becoming background noise.

INSIGHT

Complexity of Nostalgia in Curtis Bay

Older and younger residents have distinct aspirations shaped by their experience of industrial decline.
Nostalgia is complex, reflecting material losses rather than yearning for a flawless past.

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Factory fires, chemical explosions, and aerial pollutants have inexorably shaped South Baltimore into one of the most polluted places in the country. In Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore (U Chicago Press, 2024), anthropologist Chloe Ahmann explores the rise and fall of industrial lifeways on this edge of the city and the uncertainties that linger in their wake. Writing from the community of Curtis Bay, where two hundred years of technocratic hubris have carried lethal costs, Ahmann also follows local efforts to realize a good future after industry and the rifts competing visions opened between neighbors.

Examining tensions between White and Black residents, environmental activists and industrial enthusiasts, local elders and younger generations, Ahmann shows how this community has become a battleground for competing political futures whose stakes reverberate beyond its six square miles in a present after progress has lost steam. And yet—as one young resident explains — “that’s not how the story ends.” Rigorous and moving, Futures after Progress probes the deep roots of our ecological predicament, offering insight into what lies ahead for a country beset by dreams deferred and a planet on the precipice of change.

Futures after Progress is available in Open Access here.Mentioned in this episode:

Ahmann, Chloe and Anand Pandian. 2024. “The Fight Against Incineration is a Chance to Right Historic Wrongs.” Baltimore Beat, June 26.
Ahmann, Chloe. 2024. “Curtis Bay Residents Deserve a Coal-free Future.” Baltimore Sun, February 18.
Boym, Svetlana. 2007. “Nostalgia and Its Discontents.” Hedgehog Review 9(2).
Butler, Octavia. 1993. Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central Publishing.
Butler, Octavia. 1998. Parable of the Talents. New York: Grand Central Publishing.
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press.
South Baltimore Community Land Trust. https://www.sbclt.org/
Weston, Kath. 2021. “Counterfactual Ethnography: Imagining What It Takes to Live Differently.” AIBR: Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 16(3): 463–87.

Chloe Ahmann is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. Her work explores what efforts to think and enact environmental futures look like from the sedimented space of late industrialism.

Liliana Gil is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies (STS) at The Ohio State University. [please link my name.

Special thanks to Brittany Halley, Nikoo Karimi, Abigail Musch, Kate Roos, and Koray Sackan, who helped prepare this interview in the Comparative Studies Seminar in Technology and Culture.

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