The Poisoned Periphery: Research Methods for City's Edge

This essay develops the idea of the “suburban periphery”: a place of municipal and imperial dirty work, produced by circulations and dispossessions across scale. Homestead, Florida, a suburb of Miami, is home to a military base, a detention camp for migrant children, agricultural industries, and a nuclear power plant. The essay offers methodological reflections for the study of this socio-spatial formation, paying particular attention to how race becomes material through uneven exposure to hazard and to collaborative knowledge production with movements for environmental and migrant justice.