University of Oxford

Graduate Student, Anthropology

Philip Bagby Scholar, University of Oxford

Thesis Title: Sick Space and the Distributed Architecture of Two American Housing Crises

About

I study the emergency housing units referred to as FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) trailers, which were used to house those displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were found to contain high levels of formaldehyde. I use oral histories to uncover the full nitty-gritty reality of life in the trailers, digital cartography to track their current illegal resale to every corner of the US and run free chemical analysis of their potentially hazardous indoor air. I study how the interior space of the FEMA trailers shaped and patterned the lives of those who inhabited them, by way of both architecture and biochemistry. I claim that the locations of their current redistribution reveals an aspect of the multivariate housing crises of the contemporary American landscape.



If you lived in, manufactured, sold or own a FEMA trailer please feel free to get in touch.




Participants will be given the option to opt-in to contributing data to an electronic archive of text, still images, video and audio that illustrate multiple perspectives on asthma, known as The Asthma Files.

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