Struggle for Recognitional Justice: Cartographic-Affective Resistance to a Proposed Compressor Station in Buckingham County, Virginia

Abstract

The Problem: In 2014, Dominion Energy proposed a large compressor station in Buckingham County, Virginia to pressurize its Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Dominion and regulators presented demographic data that erased African Americans living near the compressor site in the community of Union Hill, to circumvent environmental justice concerns during the permitting process. Theoretical Framing: The erasure of African Americans in Union Hill for the construction of a compressor station was a recognitional injustice. Art is useful for contesting misrecognition by generating affective solidarities among various and dispersed groups of people concerned about injustice. Case Study Design: Qualitative methods are used to study how protestors deploy creativity to overcome misrecognition in Union Hill and Greater Buckingham County, Virginia. We focus, in particular, on two photographic series created to generate affect against the compressor station and pipeline. Case Study Results: Photography as art is a powerful protest tool combating misrecognition by publicly highlighting the link between people and place. While the photos highlighted are not maps in a conventional sense, they are ‘cartographic-affective’ because they (re)map the contours of life for otherwise unseen people living in Union Hill and Buckingham County. Conclusion: Cartographic-affect in the featured photographs results in recognitional justice as protesters are not only made public, but reconnected to places from which they were previously erased. In the process, the site of struggle against a petro-hegemony in North Carolina is (re)situated and (re)scaled away from the hegemon's disempowering state and census tract levels toward empowering bodily, community, and national scales.