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How to Survive the Future: Martinsville
Hosted by Indiana HumanitiesJoin us for a community listening party of the “Martinsville” episode of How to Survive the Future, followed by a discussion of the episode.
Event Details
Led by scholars Alex Chambers and Jennifer Johnson, the discussion will help us explore ways to prevent environmental crises, the historical and social consequences of these events, and more.
How to Survive the Future is a podcast created by Alex Chambers and Allison Quantz in partnership with Indiana Humanities. In How to Survive the Future, everyday people are asked to imagine a world where they have made it through the challenges of the present and faced the pain of the past and then tell us what life is like after that. Farmers, poets, parents, organizers and others imagine how their lives, and the landscapes around them, will be different than they are now—hopefully for the better, though it’s never that simple.
ABOUT THE EPISODE: When his daughters were teenagers, Chuck and his family lived close to downtown Martinsville. That was also the time – they found out later – that the city’s drinking water was most contaminated with toxic chemicals. Chuck’s dreams are with his grandson now, an early-career jazz musician making a life in a city where things are starting to look up.
ABOUT THE PANELISTS:
Alex Chambers: Alex Chambers produced How to Survive the Future with Allison Quantz. He’s also the host and producer of WFIU’s Inner States, a show about art, culture, and how it all feels, in Southern Indiana and beyond. A while back, he wrote a book of poems called Bindings: A Preparation, about domestic life and empire. When he’s not in the woods gathering sound, you might see him out for a run on the streets of Bloomington.
Jennifer Johnson: Dr. Jennifer Lee Johnson is an environmental anthropologist and Associate Professor based in the Department of Community Sustainability at Michigan State University (and until recently, in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University). She’s also currently a fellow with the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Dr. Johnson’s research examines complex human-environmental interactions at the confluence of economic, ecological, and socio-political transformations. Since 2020, she’s worked alongside residents of Martinsville, Indiana to document the causes and consequences of environmental contamination. If you’d like to share your story, visit https://www.tinyurl.com/our-short-survey to get started.