Cultural Studies Association’s Environment, Space & Place Working Group Co-Chair Richard Simpson discusses the local, global, and transnational impact of cruise ships and the cruise ship industry with Constance Dijkstra, International Maritime Organization (IMO) policy manager for the advocacy group T & E, Karla Hart, co-founder of the Global Cruise Activist Network, and Luc Renaud, Associate Professor at the Department of Urban and Tourism Studies at the University of Quebec in Montreal. This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Francesca Savoldi.
Keyword: climate change
Infrastructures of Transiency: On Cruise Ships
Learning with Infrastructures of Transiency: On Cruise Ships By Francesca Savoldi This episode elaborates critical perspectives on the social and spatial phenomenon of “cruise ship cities,” defined by Dr. Richard Simpson as a new urban dynamic where the accumulation of spatial strategies are shaped by disproportionate tourism in which tourists outnumber residents.1 The sense of…
License to Extract: How Louisiana’s Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast is Sinking It
This article explores the deployment of Louisiana’s highly touted $50 billion, fifty-year Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast, which is often characterized as saving Louisiana’s Working Coast of disappearing marshlands that are home to several major industry sectors, along with migratory flyways, seafood estuaries, and two million residents. As a concept, the Working Coast attempts to signify the importance of Louisiana’s coastal zone to the nation’s economy in order to justify expensive restoration projects. By complicating the euphemism and the extractive logic it signifies, I hope to show that the state’s current approach to slow the disappearance of its coastline in fact rationalizes the very practices sinking it. The Working Coast reifies the state’s fragile marshlands through metrics that can only be realized through continued extraction.