Public futurity: the rhetorics of sustainability and survival at the former Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery

Abstract

ABSTRACT I propose the concept of public futurity as a framework for studying how communities renegotiate collective identity in times of crisis. Public futurity, which I define as the process by which groups imagine and deliberate about their shared future, demonstrates how collective identity is maintained, negotiated, and transformed over time. I theorize how futurity is experienced collectively, drawing from scholarship on Black, queer, and disability futurity to show that appeals to futurity recognize not only the possibility of change, but the impossibility of sustaining an untenable present. I apply the concept of public futurity to an analysis of public deliberation about the fate of the former Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) oil refinery. A series of meetings organized by Philadelphia's Refinery Advisory Committee became highly contested, with mostly Black residents arguing that the site should benefit the local public and mostly white former workers fighting to keep the refinery open. Tracking how residents and former workers leveraged futurity differently in their arguments, I demonstrate how residents revealed the impossibility of the refinery's continued survival. I argue that a key process of public futurity is contending with the liminality of collective identity, and that undoing is necessary for transformation.