Chloe Ahmann (Anthropology) has received a 2023 NEH Summer Stipend for her forthcoming book project, After Apocalypse: American Ecofascism and the Violent Work of Earthly Restoration. The $6,000 award will go towards supporting Ahmann's archival research. After Apocalypse will focus on the intersection of hate groups and environmental movements and how such groups have historically come from both sides of the political spectrum.
The National Humanities Alliance released the following statement today from its Executive Director Stephen Kidd on the April announcement of $35.63 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support 258 humanities projects nationwide:
“The National Endowment for the Humanities will support faculty across the nation in their research and writing through its Summer Stipends program. Twenty-four Infrastructure and Capacity Building Challenge Grants will help organizations leverage federal funding to garner private investment in capital improvement projects, including a grant that will support the restoration of the sick bay, post office, barber shop, and torpedo-handling spaces aboard the USS Intrepid. And grants were awarded for the first time under the Spotlight on Humanities in Higher Education grant program, part of the NEH’s new initiative, American Tapestry: Weaving Together Past, Present, and Future. These new grants will support teaching and research projects that benefit underserved populations at small to mid-sized higher education institutions.”
Ahmann's new book project concerns the murderous reparative vision at the heart of ecofascism, focusing on far-right groups in the northwest United States. "That vision took spectacular form in recent shootings by avowed ecofascists who proposed that eliminating racialized people will ease environmental pressures—including in Christchurch and El Paso—but my study takes up the quiet work that fueled them. For if these shooters aspired toward world-breaking violence, they did so knowing others were preparing the Eden that would supposedly sprout up from the remains," says Ahmann. She goes on to explain that white supremacists have kept busy "claiming bioregions, going vegan, recruiting men on hikes, and laboring in other ways to graft whiteness onto planetary futures. These quotidian efforts are not at odds with ecofascist terror. They are precisely where that terror is being cultivated. It is therefore urgent to understand the concept-world that gives them traction: one that links elimination to repair, rendering violence legible as environmental care, and where mass shootings can be pitched as preemptive strikes against the ravages of climate change."
More information about Ahmann's work is available on her website.
Learn more about the NEH Summer Stipend program by clicking here.
