“I began this book as an anthropologist, but a few pages in, realized I was reading it as the little Black boy who acquired a chronic respiratory illness while growing up in Baltimore. I was playing football outside and suddenly couldn’t breathe. Then an ambulance came. Before long, inhalers, respirators, and ventilators were a feature of everyday life—both for me and my two brothers, who also suffered from asthma. I wish we had Ahmann’s book back then. Maybe, just maybe, we would’ve better understood the uncertainties of a childhood existence defined by hazy and noxious forces that threatened to debilitate and kill us. Written with empathy and backed by rigorous analysis, <i>Futures after Progress</i> is a revelation.”

Laurence Ralph, author of Sito: An American Teenager and the City that Failed Him

“Ahmann folds time and space in this stunning ethnography to ask how a future tense forms after sacrifice, resilience, and progress are exhausted—a vital intervention into contemporary conditions.”

Joseph Masco, University of Chicago