Derailed: Corporate Rail and Toxic Exposure

Join us for "Corporate Rail and Toxic Exposure" with Nicole Fabricant.

Fabricant teaches anthropology at Towson University. Her academic and activist work has transitioned from Latin America to US-based environmental justice. Her work focuses on distinct groups of people coming together to build movements for housing/environmental justice. She spent decades fighting alongside South Baltimore Community Land Trust and building a participatory action research class at Benjamin Franklin High School.

The product of this movement work was Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore (University of California Press, 2022), which examines the cumulative impacts of industrial stationary toxic facilities in South Baltimore. It follows a dynamic and creative group of high school students who decided to fight back against the race- and class-based health disparities and inequality of industrial expansion.

As a Baltimore resident and activist-scholar, Fabricant documents how these young organizers came to envision, design, and create a more just and sustainable future. Fighting to Breathe received the 2024 APLA book prize for best critical ethnography in political anthropology.