Ethan Tupelo

Ethan Tupelo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Critical Social Thought at Hampshire College. His work is at the interdisciplinary intersection of environmental politics, political theory, and social movements. Using a multi-sited, ethnographically-grounded approach, Tupelo draws connections between local waste practices and transnational environmental destruction, challenging dominant narratives about technological progress and sustainability. Contrasting work that emphasizes technical solutions to ecological crises, his work urges recognition of their underlying political sources, how those forms of domination and inequality can be effectively challenged, and envisioning an ecologically just society.

Tupelo’s book manuscript, entitled Debris of Progress: A Political Ethnography of Critical Infrastructure, focuses on Pedal People, a twenty year-old worker cooperative based in Northampton, Massachusetts. The cooperative is one of the main waste haulers in the city, but does all of its work by bicycle. While working with them as a participant-observer and worker-owner for five years (while he worked on his graduate degree), hauling eight-foot long trailers filled with over 300 pounds of waste across a total distance of over 9000 miles, he shows how they challenge the destructiveness of waste infrastructure in their community in multiple dimensions: eliminating the use of fossil fuels, providing worker ownership and control, and reclaiming the value of dirty work. This kind of hauling is more common in the Global South, but done as a successful business in the context of the ‘developed’ world, projects like these challenge common narratives of economic development and technological progress, where it would seem ‘obvious’ and ‘inevitable’ that more advanced machinery will displace human-powered work, and that such ‘progress’ would be beneficial and desirable to all involved.

Instead of overworked and low-paid truck drivers, rushing between pickups, belching exhaust, and disrupting sleep with early morning pickups, residents see highly-paid workers, hauling the same materials without fossil fuels, using simple equipment that can be easily and locally repaired.   However, like other similar local challenges, they are plugged into larger regional and global infrastructures, the effects of which are largely outside their influence. Tupelo followed the waste as it travelled through these infrastructures, from households, to transfer stations, to regional recycling facilities, to the sanitary landfill for most of the regional waste hundreds of miles away. In doing so, he shows how these complex systems are affected by local residents, waste haulers, state regulators, and foreign governments. He argues that local initiatives like these provide openings for solving some of the most dire political and environmental problems of our time, while they simultaneously obscure and even reinforce the very problems they set out to solve. Despite all the real gains made in terms of social and ecological justice, ultimately the waste is going to the same place.

In interviews, customers express trust that the cooperative is ‘doing something good’ with the waste, even though virtually none know what actually happens to it. Others even share sentiments of feeling positive about the items they leave out, since they are being dealt with in what appears to be an ecologically sound way. This ambivalence of the effects of infrastructural challenges, seeming to improve some aspects, while exacerbating others, can be seen in even more complex systems, such as similar transformational projects in food or energy infrastructures.

While generated through a political ethnography of one specific case, Tupelo uses this study to develop a theory of critical infrastructure, as a way of analyzing the power relations within infrastructure that normalize human destructiveness to the biosphere. Tupelo conceptualizes infrastructure as the material and discursive ‘background’ of everyday life, in which and through which ‘normal’ activity occurs. He uses “critical” infrastructure in three senses: 1) denoting the most important forms of infrastructure that are widely seen as necessary for present-day urban civilization to function; 2) as programs of resistance undertaken by particular actors embedded within infrastructural projects, who understand themselves to be challenging or otherwise transforming dominant forms of power relations; and 3) in the sense of Critical Theory, to connote an approach to the study of infrastructure that prioritizes analysis of the practices and ideologies of domination with an orientation towards liberation. Analyzing infrastructure in this explicitly political way allows us to better understand the power dynamics embedded within these complex systems, and how they can be effectively challenged.

Tupelo’s future work will build on the critical infrastructure theory developed in his book manuscript by examining the political implications of large-scale, top-down attempts to address the climate disaster, exemplified by the Green New Deal. Like other similar programs launched throughout the Global North, the fixation of such programs on technological solutions ignores the importance of local participation and decision-making, reinforces the trade imbalances that increase global inequality, and remains dependent on forms of ecological destruction like mineral mining. Tupelo contrasts these with several key cases of smaller-scale forms of mitigation, which increase local control, autonomy, and resiliency. This project highlights the entanglement of the ecological crisis with state power and democratic practices, often ignored when focusing only on technological solutions.

In conjunction with his academic work, Tupelo has been involved in a range of social movements. While an undergraduate in Washington, DC, he was an organizer in the Global Justice Movement, during which he branched out to anti-war and union organizing. He co-operated an egalitarian rural commune in Virginia for several years, and recently has been involved in regional worker cooperatives beyond Pedal People through the Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives. Tupelo holds his academic work and commitment towards social justice as inexorably linked, each making the other more effective.

This also informs Tupelo’s teaching methodologies, which help students develop skills to analyze and challenge systems of domination. For four years at UMass, he taught an introductory Comparative Politics course to first semester students, structured to cover the historical evolution of core inequalities that have shaped our contemporary world, from the rise of modern states, through the colonial and decolonial eras, ending with potentials for addressing these legacies. At Hampshire, his course on Waste, Politics, and the Environmental Crisis draws together many of the above themes, where students will investigate their own waste practices, the politics and inequalities that revolves around waste, where is this ‘away’ to which we throw all this unwanted matter, and what is existence like for those who live there. Students in Social Movements: Theory, Practice, Strategy will develop a collective strategy guide, based on theory and practice from social movement scholars and practitioners, and then apply that guide to an issue of their choosing, designing a phase of a movement campaign.

Ethan Shiya Hirsh Tupelo earned his PhD in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2022 and his BA in International Studies from American University (Washington, DC) in 2004. He can be reached at etupelo@pm.me. Current information on research, teaching, and activism can be found at http://ethantupelo.com.