For several years the authors have been working in Detroit with grassroots coalitions resisting Emergency Management. In this essay, we focus on how community groups in Detroit and Flint advanced common struggles for clean, safe, affordable water as a human right, particularly during the period of 2014 to 2016. We explore how, through a series of direct interventions – including public meetings and international gatherings, independent journalism and social media, community-based research projects, and citizen-led policy initiatives – these (...) groups contributed to challenging neoliberal governance, to undermining the legitimacy of state officials and their policies, and to shifting public consciousness around the human right to water. (shrink)

Over the past five years the authors have been working in Detroit with grassroots coalitions resisting emergency management. In this essay, we explore how community groups in Detroit and Flint have advanced common struggles for clean, safe, affordable water as a human right, offering an account of activism that has directly confronted neoliberalism across the state. We analyze how solidarity has been forged through community organizing, interventions into mainstream media portrayals of the water crises, and the articulation of (...) counternarratives that center the experiences, needs, and collective power of those most directly affected. While our rootedness in Detroit leads us to focus primarily on the experiences of activists based there rather than in Flint, we insist throughout that the experiences, resistance, and aspirations of these communities are best understood as interconnected and mutually empowering. (shrink)

El cine de Jim Jarmusch es reconocible por captar momentos de quietud en los que la acción y el drama son secundarios. Es por ello que su film Only Lovers Left Alive ha sido tan destacado por críticos y académicos. Esta película ha llevado a la pantalla la estética ruinosa de Detroit. Este artículo amplía esas recientes investigaciones, para postular que la Detroit de Jarmusch es una ciudad estéticamente inorgánica. Siguiendo a grandes rasgos los lineamientos de Wilhelm Worringer, (...) se analiza el estilo postindustrial de la arquitectura de Detroit y la figura del vampiro. Esto permite concluir que lo inorgánico —Detroit— tiene capacidades estéticas propias, las cuales son exaltadas por el particular estilo de Jarmusch. (shrink)

In 1947, the U.S. Secretary of State, George C. Marshall announced that the USA would provide development aid to help the recovery and reconstruction of the economies of Europe, which was widely known as the ‘Marshall Plan’. In Italy, this plan generated a resurgence of modern industrialization and remodeled Italian Industry based on American models of production. As the result of these transnational transfers, the systemic approach known as Fordism largely succeeded and allowed some Italian firms such as Fiat to (...) flourish. During this period, Detroit and Turin, homes to the most powerful automobile corporations of the twentieth century, became intertwined in a web of common features such as industrial concentration, mass flows of immigrations, uneven urban sprawl, radical iconography and inner-city decay, which characterized Fordism in both cities. In the crucial decades of the postwar expansion of the automobile industries, both cities were hubs of labor battles and social movements. However, after the radical decline in their industries as previous auto cities, they experienced the radical shift toward post-Fordist urbanization and production of political urbanism. This research responds to the recent interest for a comparative (re)turn in urban studies by suggesting the conceptual theoretical baseline for the proposed comparative framework in post-Fordist cities. In better words, it develops a “theory” on the challenges of comparative urbanism in post-Fordist cities. (shrink)

This article reviews the recent crisis in Detroit focusing on the placement of an Emergency Manager in charge of financial decisions, and a bankruptcy process. This political disenfranchisement harmed the pensions of city employees and offered valuable real estate to investors at low prices. While the crisis was long in the making, with deindustrialization and residential segregation beginning in the 1950s, the crisis was exacerbated in 2008 with the mortgage crisis and with water shut-offs to residences. The greatest harms (...) were felt by African American families in the city. The article takes toll of the harms suffered and chronicles movements of resistance against Emergency Management and community organizing efforts. (shrink)

The paper discusses the concept of "crisis" in the context of the city of Detroit's bankruptcy under the rule of the Governor-appointed Emergency Manager. In their recent book, Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou discuss the concept of dispossession in all its complexity, in the context of enforced austerity measures in Europe and a global Occupy movement. The concept of “dispossession” clarifies how we actually depend on others in a sustained social world, that in fact the self is social. I (...) will use their reflections as a springboard for analysis of the imposition of an emergency manager on the City of Detroit and the subsequent bankruptcy hearings for the city, which along with the mortgage and foreclosure crisis and now recent water shut-offs have resulted in dispossessing the poorest of the poor from their modest possessions. However Detroit is also the scene of a robust response, as people take to the streets in acts of solidarity to demand their city back. As Athena and Butler caution, activists should not fall into reinforcing the disastrous concept of personhood reinforced by possession. There are other ways of engaging with each other politically to forge a common cause that escape the negative aspects of “possession.” The project of getting people together at the grassroots, knowing each other, finding strength in leaning on each other, finding confidence to challenge the status quo that is tearing communities apart – that is the activism that is ongoing in Detroit. (shrink)

The Fifty-Year Rebellion invites us to consider Detroit’s recent history as both epitomizing and shaping national trends. But it’s not the kind of invitation we’ve all grown used to...

As the federal government distributed remdesivir to some of the states COVID-19 hit hardest, policymakers scrambled to develop criteria to allocate the drug to their hospitals. Our state, Michigan, was among those states to receive an initial quantity of the drug from the U.S. government. The disparities in burden of disease in Michigan are striking. Detroit has a death rate more than three times the state average. Our recommendation to the state was that it should prioritize the communities that (...) bear a disproportionate burden of suffering in the allocation of the new potential treatment. This recommendation is justified not only for new drugs with uncertain effects, but also for drugs of certain benefit or vaccines. For states with significant health disparities, such as Michigan, this allocation priority may help to repair them. In fact, any other allocation strategy may make them worse. (shrink)

2006. George Boole. Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2nd edition. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA. -/- George Boole (1815-1864), whose name lives among modern computer-related sciences in Boolean Algebra, Boolean Logic, Boolean Operations, and the like, is one of the most celebrated logicians of all time. Ironically, his actual writings often go unread and his actual contributions to logic are virtually unknown—despite the fact that he was one of the clearest writers in the field. Working with various students including Susan Wood and (...) Sriram Nambiar, I have written several publications trying to set the record straight—but so far to little avail. This encyclopedia entry is one more attempt to set the record straight in a way that can be appreciated by non-experts.Also see https://www.academia.edu/10161999/Booles_criteria_of_validity_and_invalidity . (shrink)

Mark Coeckelbergh starts his book with a very powerful picture based on a real incident: On the 9th of January 2020, Robert Williams was wrongfully arrested by Detroit police officers in front of his two young daughters, wife and neighbors. For 18 hours the police would not disclose the grounds for his arrest (American Civil Liberties Union 2020; Hill 2020). The decision to arrest him was primarily based on a facial detection algorithm which matched Mr. Williams’ driving license photo (...) with the picture of a man who was suspected of watch theft two years earlier. Not only did the computer ‘get it wrong’ as one of the detectives said, when Mr. Williams made them aware that the picture of the suspect obviously wasn’t resembling him, the probably unreliable algorithm very likely contributed to racial discrimination (Hill 2020). It is well documented that many available facial detection algorithms at this time had significant problems (e.g. a comparably high false positive rate) with respect to black persons, like Mr. Williams (NIST 2019). Multiple causes may exist, such as unbalanced training datasets and insufficient optimization. Coeckelbergh compares the disturbing case of Mr. Williams with a political interpretation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, where the protagonist, Josef K., is accused of an unspecified crime by an opaque, oppressive and absurd bureaucracy: “In the 21st-century United States, Josef K. is black and is falsely accused by an algorithm, without explanation” (p. 2). (shrink)

A discussion of the ethics of stem cell research, and attempts to regulate it.