Death due to opiate overdose is a growing concern in the U.S. Together with mental health, wellbeing, and employment, opiate addiction is one of the topics often described as contributing to a national crisis (Mega 2020). However, in public discourse the concept of crisis is wielded to depict situations that seem without solutions.

Driving around northeastern New York on the roads known as ‘heroin highway,’ the landscape once shaped by growing industries is a familiar blur of dispossession. The towns and spaces in between along the winding line of weathered asphalt are defined by overlapping narratives of crisis: the chemical dehumanization and death– embodied in the synthetic opioid fentanyl – and the damaged environments, illegible economies, and suffering bodies of late industrialism. My early work with law enforcement agents, drug courts, and archives found these overlapping crises to be far from total: seemingly “ruined” people and places along the highway are entwined with the area’s postindustrial middle class, extensive green spaces, and thriving ecotourism.

Decades after the Army closed the Savanna Army Depot in 2000, the lingering impact from its past use haunts this place in the soil and groundwater. Upon its closure, the Environmental Protection Agency declared the Savanna Army Depot a Superfund site, given the enduring contamination from TNT, asbestos, unexploded ordnance, chemical pollutants, and the residues of other environmental hazards. The Department of Defense is responsible for funding the restoration of former military lands to communities in a usable state, but the cleanup has been glacial at many sites like the Savanna Army Depot. In the years—decades—since, residents of Savanna have experienced the facility’s closure and its subsequent neglect as a long crisis of abandonment.

I grew up in a food insecure household in Appalachian Eastern Kentucky, yet I can understand why hunger is believed to be far away. Our hunger was a stigmatized secret, pushed to the back of the pantry, just like the expired can of yams we hoarded just in case social services came by—or we reached a new threshold of desperation.

This photo essay is a collaboration among Isiah ThoughtPoet Veney, Ana Croegaert, and Jacob Campbell, and reflects on the challenges faced by residents in long-disinvested neighborhoods in the deeply segregated city. Isiah leads us in the essay, reminding us that, although devastated by racialized urban planning systems and job loss, decades of criminalization, police-sanctioned torture, and lack of adequate mental health care, people in his communities create beauty, express love, endeavor to take care of one another (Contreras 2021). They reach out across neighborhoods and racial difference to build connections that, although fragile, are needed now, as ever.

Crisis in the Chip Industry and the Fragmentation of Community By: Sarah Appelhans “This industry is really cyclical, up and down, up and down, up

In this vignette, I am centering the gaze of our group, whose labor and ethics of distribution encapsulated the definition of mutual aid as the “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from the awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them” (Spade 2020, 7). I especially engage with mutual aid groups coming out of the Covid-19 crisis and the values that shape their work. These values lie in the acts of solidarity of supporting protests through the distribution of supplies. They also manifest through non-hierarchical acts of distribution, that is, the refusal of means testing, policing needs or paperwork. Finally, there is a politicization of abundance, mobilized by mutual aid organizations as a response to municipal policies of austerity in the wake of the pandemic.

Sarah Robert and Kate Haq examine the afterlives of crisis in Buffalo, their civic home and research field. In the aftermath of the white supremacist shooting of Black Buffalonians at the only grocery store in a Black neighborhood, they ask about another form of white supremacy: the inertia of white liberal ideologies and the enclosure of white supremacist violence within white liberal apathy. Considering their own participation in white civic subjectivities, the photos here document the authors’ beginning with a sense of understanding whiteness within antiracist contexts, and an attempt to move toward a more active stage of autonomously confronting and addressing white supremacy’s many ideological expressions.

In this piece, Mikey Elster compares “the experiences of trans people and their relatives to the media coverage of trans healthcare to demonstrate the complicity of national media in stoking a moral panic that empowers reactionary political forces. This coverage amounts to promoting what Antonio Gramsci called ‘common sense’ by disseminating numerous anecdotal, non-systematic concerns, questions, and narrative frameworks that taken together imply a need for dramatic restrictions on healthcare.”

In this piece I consider how far right agitators use so-called “culture war” issues to build an insurgent politics, particularly around the institutions of the family and the public school. While popular renderings of the far right often frame “culture wars” as flashpoints of ideological contestation, I argue that far right political mobilization relies on culture wars to create a collective feeling of crisis around the social reproduction of the white heteronormative settler family.

In this article, Alice Chen explores how the relationship between technology development and the climate crisis is transformed into a discourse over the political economy of quick research, debating the “speed” of US government funding versus the “speed” of private industry on funding breakthroughs.