Analyze

Alliance Building & Recognitional Justice in Schools

prerna_srigyan
Annotation of
In response to

Cudahy elementary school’s struggle for environmental justice foregrounds how sites of industrialization connect to organization of schools and other public institutions. I am curious about the work of organizations involved in the struggle–Cudahy Alliance for Justice, East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice (EYCEJ). I am also curious about the tactics and strategies used by these individuals and organizations to attain recognitional justice (being heard and listened to): how did they get DTSC and the school district to get them to listen? Further, the latter half of the story focuses on the proposed construction of a charter school nearby the elementary school: How do environmental governance and education restructuring shape each other?

 

srigyan annotation on behringer 1

prerna_srigyan
Annotation of
In response to

The podcast episode tells the story of the Park View Elementary School in Cudahy, LA County. Located on a former toxic dump, parents and educators have been involved in decades’ long fight to remediate and clean up the school land. That fight has not been easy. They have encountered an apathetic school district and a slowly-moving Dept. of Toxic Substances Control.  The coalition of parents, educators, and activists gained traction by collaborating with Spanish language media productions. The school closed down for a cleanup and reopened in 2001, but students and educators still reported feeling sick. They later found out that the cleanup had been planned to be short-term and a longer remediation plan was underway. Many parents shifted schools. The story continued with the proposal to build a charter school just a few miles away from the elementary school and from a former Exide battery recycling plant. The podcast offers a narrative-style discussion of cumulative impacts, mapping tools that make it possible to visualize different datasets to display disproportionate burdens, and structural and recognitional injustices that the parents and educators faced.

amanufacturedethics6

lucypei
Annotation of
In response to

The positioning that you have to choose, and that Bono gets to choose, between livable working conditions and wages vs HIV treatment - forecloses possibility of HIV treatment AND acceptable working conditions. 

Forecloses critique of the industries’ unethical work conditions - because they are “proven” by inspectors to have good working conditions, and the bodies of the HIV worker-patients who are treated are proof of the goodness of the corps

Worker resistance is foreclosed because they know they depend on this “ethical” reputation to even have industry in their country, which is needed for survival because of past extractions and present oppressive global trade conditions

 

amanufacturedethics5

lucypei
Annotation of
In response to

Bind that the workers are in - they have to perform the ethicalness and pretend their working conditions are ok when inspected because they know that their job (and the whole country’s export industry) depends on this performance of ethicalness and goodness of the factory

Performed Inspections provide proof, as do their HIV-treated bodies

 

Bono - celebrities promoting - people and at the stores purchasing/consuming branded RED products - blatantly baking “ethical” into the branding of consumer goods. 

 

Obscure bad working conditions with success of HIV treatment

 

amanufacturedethics3

lucypei
Annotation of
In response to

Fails on the worker’s understanding of responsibility to care for the sick -  violation of moral order because factory makes you sick 

Rejects and sidesteps responsibility for horrible working conditions (exposure and unlivable wages, no maternity leave, insecure) - focus instead on the HIV, for which they claim they have no responsibility, the HIV was already there, so they are responsible for treating those who are their current factory workers, giving them drugs and treatments that help them to be productive bodies, give them trainings that responsibilize them for getting the disease

The ethical is something you can enforce with these performed audits

The ethical is something consumers buy that’s branded and ethically produced - the ethical production is “no sweat” and also made by people whose suffering the profits can go to help

 

amanufacturedethics2

lucypei
Annotation of
In response to

Celebrities and emotional and political sovereignty: “The vague network of forces for which Bono acts as spokesperson decides that HIV treatment is more important, and by extension, that labor violations, work rights, poverty, occupational health risks are less urgent forms of social suffering” -p474

ALAFA, a PPP organization, also makes this decision for the workers

ILO as well, as the inspectors

 

amanufaturedetheics1

lucypei
Annotation of
In response to

CSR through humanitarian fetishism, humanitarian consumption of ethical production, ethical industries or ethical production zones, where up the supply chain the brand buyers demand suppliers down the chain be “ethical” (while still demanding obscenely low prices, so of course it’s not possible). 

Ethical production zone against the race-to-bottom for garment manufacturing - instead of the labor being cheap they are sick in a way that the corporation can treat to its own benefit while gaining moral capital - it is a PPP so there are many “stakeholders” paying for different things

Celebrity involvement - consumers of humanitarian products