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The event is free to attend. Please sign up in advance here: https://cape.ku.dk/eng/calendar/2026/breath-air-life-public-health-burdens-and-oil-refining-on-st.-croix/Talk by Tami Navarro, cultural anthropologist and associate professor, Drew University.
This talk explores the environmental and health impacts of the oil refining industry on the island of St. Croix, in the United States Virgin Islands (USVI, formerly the Danish West Indies).
Drawing from scholarship and activism within anthropology, ecology, environmental studies, and feminist studies, this talk centers the irreversible environmental damage of oil refining and suggests the possibility of an inhabitable future by looking to community activism and a history of feminist organizing.
Navarro ties this work on oil to the ongoing history of hurricanes that affect the USVI, arguing that the disposability of these islands and their people serve as the groundwork for both of these realities. The dramatic increase in record-breaking hurricanes, most notably demonstrated by Hurricanes Maria and Irma within days of one another, speak to the changing climate conditions with which residents must grapple. At the heart of this talk is a central provocation: How can Virgin Islanders create inhabitable futures while living in a series of unfolding environmental crises?
This talk will be followed by a reception with some light refreshments.
Speaker bio:
Tami Navarro is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Drew University. She is a founding member of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective (VISCO) and a member of the Editorial Board for the journal Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.
Dr. Navarro is the author of Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands (SUNY Press 2021) which was recognized by the Association for Feminist Anthropology and the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. Her work has been published in Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Transforming Anthropology, Small Axe Salon, The Caribbean Writer, Social Text, and Feminist Anthropology. She is currently at work on a project tentatively entitled “In the Event of Emergency/You Are Here,” which explores competing notions of belonging in the US Virgin Islands during moments of crisis.
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Event Venue
Læderstræde 20, 1201 Copenhagen, Denmark, Læderstræde 20, 1201 København K, Danmark, Copenhagen , Denmark
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