The Double Binds of Crisis and Recovery: Constituting Space, Place, and Subjecthood in Flint, Michigan

This dissertation project, The Double Binds of Crisis and Recovery: Constituting Space,Place, and Subjecthood in Flint, Michigan, explores how ongoing cycles of crisis and recovery shape civic life and socio-political citizenship for residents of a former manufacturing town in the Midwestern United States. Situated at the intersection of anthropology, history, political science, and cultural studies, the project draws on 27 months of ethnographic research between 2018-2020 with neighborhood groups and local organizations to understand how people in a community perpetually tasked with recovering from crisis constitute themselves as subjects in relation to one another, to place, to governing structures, and to other forms of institutional power. Focusing on this perpetual state of recovery as a set of material, sociopolitical, and psychosocial conditions from within which people in Flint make their lives, I describe and theorize the double binds that characterize ongoing recovery efforts and constitute local subjecthood in Flint. These are the double binds of constrained self-determination, I argue, whereby people faced with unfavorable structures or conditions are enlisted as responsible for effecting change themselves, while effectively limited in their power to do so by those very same structures or conditions. Caught in the double binds of constrained self-determination, I demonstrate, people in local settings such as Flint are enacting themselves in ways that reflect changing models of "responsible" citizenship.