Making & Breaking Homes in Georgia's Black Belt: Energy, Utility Bills, & the Infrastructures of Belonging

A talk by Dr. Kristin Philips

"Making & Breaking Homes in Georgia's Black Belt: Energy, Utility Bills, & the Infrastructures of Belonging"

Abstract: For many comfortable middle-income households, paying the electricity bill is a mundane, even mindless, act. But for an increasing number of families in the United States, the electricity bill—filtered through the racialized materiality of poor-quality and energy-inefficient housing stock, defective metering technologies, and anti-democratic regulation—has come to represent something far more ominous: looming disconnection, eviction, and the loss of homes they hold dear. This paper takes the project of making homes as the starting place for insights into the social, political, and economic significance of energy for the one-third of households in the southeastern United States who struggle to pay their electricity bill. Based on ongoing ethnographic research in southwest Georgia, the heart of Georgia’s Black Belt (Du Bois 1903), the paper asks: What does home mean to people living in the checkered wake of chattel slavery, civil rights organizing, and ongoing dispossession?  How do they understand the role of energy and utility bills in making and keeping homes? Drawing on interviews with low-income housed and transitionally housed people, this paper troubles the conventional focus on a socially flat notion of ‘household’ in studies of energy poverty by exploring the significance of energy and utility bills to making and keeping ‘homes’.

Biography: As a sociocultural anthropologist with regional interests in East Africa and the southern United States, my research examines the basic human project of ‘getting by’ in an age of planetary reckoning. I study how people understand and live with poverty and inequality; how they engage and experience policies and infrastructures; and how they vie for voice and resources amidst other everyday pursuits of livelihood, connection, and meaning.

My first book project traced how generations of food insecurity have shaped political activism in rural central Tanzania (An Ethnography of Hunger: Politics, Subsistence, and the Unpredictable Grace of the Sun; Indiana University Press: 2018). An Ethnography of Hunger was Co-Winner of the 2020 Society for Economic Anthropology Book Prize for best book in the last three years an Honor, an Honorable Mention for the 2019 African Studies Association’s Book Prize, and a finalist for the 2020 Fage & Oliver Prize of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom.

I now have two concurrent research projects on the intersections of energy, poverty, and infrastructure, both funded by the National Science Foundation. The first, “Energy Burden and the Making and Meaning of Home” (NSF #2218064) is an ethnography of the disproportionate energy burden (spending more than 10% of income on energy costs) on low-income households in the Deep South and its significance in their struggle to secure housing and make meaningful homes. Since 2017 I have also collaborated with Erin Dean to study energy, infrastructure, and gender in Tanzania. The project (NSF #1853185 and NSF #1853109), focuses on people and places unserved by the national electricity grid. We ask how people in Tanzania navigate the convergence and contradictions of two global projects—energy access and energy transition—that seek to both expand energy production, markets, and consumption and also reduce carbon emissions in the context of unequal relationships, postcolonial histories, and highly gendered ideas about energy, labor, and space.