Ayluonne Txai Tereszkiewicz is a joint Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. Her research asks: In the American Southeast, how do Superfund remediations become flashpoints for complicating the “pre-harm” and “post-harm” imaginations of clean environmental futures? 

Ayluonne will direct this inquiry toward the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its remediations of historically Black towns along North Carolina’s sea coast. Through investigating localized understandings—and iterations—of harm and repair, Ayluonne will interrogate conceptual, material, and embodied relationships between the EPA’s remediation procedures and local practices for historical restoration and heritage-keeping. 

As an IHUM fellow, Ayluonne will critically experiment with the multi-dimensionality of her dissertation field sites. Using creative interdisciplinary training, she aims to re-encounter the contents of her multi-modal fieldwork archive and to craft new ways to sensorially interpret and articulate these materials against the capture of an ethnographic gaze. The final goal is to generate destabilizing visual compositions that converge the enduring legacies of fast (chattel slavery) and ongoing slow (environmental toxicity and climate-induced erosion) violences with the physical and affective poetics of heritage.

Ayluonne grew up in San Francisco, California, and earned her B.A. in Anthropology (receiving magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors) from Columbia University.