8 “Save Ga$. Ride this Bus”: Racialised Poverty, Violence and Climate Change in Urban America
In: Cultural Dynamics of Climate Change and the Environment in Northern AmericaSearch for other papers by Jürgen Heinrichs in
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Abstract
This project examines the relationship between poverty, violence, race relations and environmental change in the United States today. Focusing on a bus line in Newark, New Jersey, this essay evokes the experience of riding a bus as a platform for studying a host of social and political conflicts that presently unfold in American society. Campaigns prompting people to switch from individual (car) to shared (bus) modes of transportation as a means to avert climate change often mask underlying class divisions and racialised poverty. Engaging the inextricable histories of race, mobility and economic inequality, this essay employs art history and cultural studies to chart how public transportation continues to function as a space in which social and political conflict unfolds.