Performance and Proximity: Revisiting environmental justice in Warren County, North Carolina

This paper discusses how performance ethnography has the potential to intervene in research praxis on environmental justice, by combining the analytic, the aesthetic and the activist. Performance enables a politics of proximity that allows research to be accountable to and in dialogue with communities impacted by environmental justice. This paper draws on a case study of a collaborative film project that captures the environmental history of Warren County through the perspective of a community leader. Stories and scenes from this collaborative research process are woven in with reflections on research as performance. Performance allows for critical analysis of human-toxin interactions, and as a form of aesthetic engagement, creates the possibility of dialogic knowledge production, rooted in place and embodied in practice.