Analyze

The ASTROMOVES project captures the career decision-making of astrophysicists and those in adjacent sciences, with particular attention to ‘intersectional’ identities, sex/gender diversity and visible/invisible disabilities. Qualitative interviews were recorded online (due to the Pandemic) and each scientist was assigned an Indigenous Hawaiian pseudonym. This was a subversive move to remind astrophysicists of the enormous debt they owe to the Hawaiian people for the use of their sacred mountain tops. All of the scientists consented to having a Hawaiian name. Seven scientists chose their own pseudonyms, most were Hawaiian place names: Maui, Waikiki, Waiheke, and Holualoa. Two Brazilians likewise chose Indigenous place names: Caramuru and Paraguaçu. The last name chosen was Kū'oko'a. Kū'oko'a is the Hawaiian concept of freedom, of which I was unaware. When questioned by editors, I had to evoke my Oahu birth as my right to use Hawaiian pseudonyms. For my visualizations, I chose to not use the Mercator projection which artificially enlarges Europe, instead I use the Peters projection or equal area map. Thus, Europe is de-emphasized by showing its area relative to the rest of the world. 

Holbrook, Jarita. 2023. "Visualizing Astrophysicists’ Careers." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11

I live in Glendale, CA. I completed by PhD at UCLA in the Graduate School of Education in 2020. I am interested in collaborative, visual, and experitmental research methods. My dissertation used youth participatory action research (YPAR) to examine children's health knowledge of the chronic illness and organ (heart) transplantation. I am interested in how COVID-19 impacts youth educational experiences and reinforces educational disparities. 

I can reached at ntanio[at]gmail[dot]com

I am especially interested in:

How are K-12 schools (primary and secondary schools) responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, what kind of support have they been given, what problems have emerged, and how are these problems being tracked and responded to?

How are universities responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, what kind of support have they been given, what problems have emerged, and how are these problems being tracked and responded to?

I am a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. I am working on my doctoral dissertation that explores post-disaster ecological imaginary shaped and performed through data practices in post-Fukushima Japan. My project examines how data practices of citizen radiation detection activities construct and reconfigure the understanding and experience of citizen scientists regarding post-Fukushima “Japan” as part of the ecosystem.  For further projects, I am also interested in the sociocultural role of small data in the era of big data and how small data that represent and intervene in environmental issues are intersected and interacted with big data in various domains. 

I am currently participating in the Transnational Disaster STS COVID-19 project and the COVID-19 and Data group as a subgroup of the project above. As a member of these groups, I am unraveling COVID-19 data practices and the relationships among multiple data actors such as the government, research institutions, media, and citizen scientists in Japan. I am also interested in how differently citizen data platforms have been gaining scientific and political authorities in Japan, the U.S., and South Korea during the pandemic.

I am particularly interested in these questions: 

• What do different disciplines and communities involved in COVID-19 response mean by “good data”?

• How do local, national, and global data intersect, interact, and compete with each other? 

• What is shown and what is revealed or disregarded in COVID-19 data produced about different settings (a particular city, region, or country, for example)?

• How are COVID-19 GIS data integrated with other data forms? What is the role of the GIS data in different COVID-19 settings?

• What is the role of civic data as COVID-19 information in comparison to governmental or institutional data?

• What do people expect from data within the COVID-19 pandemic? 

• How is the data circulated for COVID-19 different from data produced in another pandemic period?

I can be contacted at inahk[at]uci.edu.

I am a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. I am currently in (or around) Austin, Texas conducting fieldwork for my dissertation on the science and politics of transitioning to renewable energy resources in Austin, Texas. I have helped design and undertake geographically dispersed and collaborative PECE projects that have investigated toxic subjects and places, transnational sts, and quotidian anthropocenes. I can be reached by email at jradams1@uci.edu.

I am also a part of the Energy in COVID-19 Research Group that is a thematic subgroup of the larger Transnational STS COVID-19 Project. In this group we focus on how energy consumption, services, production, and futures have been impacted by the current pandemic.

The transnational STS COVID-19 project also intersects with my work at the level of city-scale questions pertaining to how COVID-19 related policies and practices are impacting and influencing strategies and processes of political engagement.  Accordingly, out of the project-wide analytic, I have been focusing on the following questions:

How is ‘social distancing’ practiced and interpreted in different COVID-19 settings?

How is the aftermath of COVID-19 crisis being imagined in different settings? How is this shaping beliefs, practices, and policies?

I would love to have the community that has come together around this project to collaborate on creating some resources that could be interesting to broader academic and non-academic communities. For example, it would be great to work together to create some timelines on the platform around various themes relevant to COVID-19, and to do critical readings toghether of key scientific or official documents using the annotation features.

Beyond creating the "products" themselves, I think we would get a lot out of exercise in terms of thinking together on these kinds of projects.

The authors "define disaster media as a heuristic, or approach, that recognizes the ways “natural” and human-made disasters are communicated about, constructed, and variously exacerbated or relieved through media means. This heuristic is not simply a temporary model for problem solving but tries to account for ecological forces and material conditions" (my emphasis).

They close the article with three provocations:

1) All Media on Deck: the current moment of combo disaster (COVID and climate crisis) requires the production of more public and open access materials (of various kinds), but also boosting of media literacy. The auhtors acknowledge the conundrum of producing more media, while being confronted with sustainability issues and the call for "no-carbon" media.

2) Relief and media Production: a critical look at the kinds of assumptions that governments/NGOs/industry bring to COVID-19 relief efforts (videos, websites, maps, algorithms...) -- what counts as relief and for whom? 

3) Focus on Social and Environmental Justice: "In moving forward, it will be crucial to approach disaster media as a domain in which structural reform agendas that interweave social and environmental justice can flourish."

In the article, the authors address visualizations of COVID cases, including related satellite mages of air pollution in Southern California and China (generated by NASA/ESA) as well as of mass graves in Iran.

First, they provide basic framing of how to critically read air pollution satellite imagery. Connections between COVID-19 measures and improvements in air pollution are not identifiable in a straightforward way.

"Figure 1a, for instance, uses bright magenta to indicate greater concentrations of nitrogen dioxide and light blue to signify cleaner air. However, such color choices can be misleading: there is no material correlation between nitrogen dioxide and the color magenta; and reduced traces of this chemical do not turn the sky a paler shade of blue. [...] color-coding selections imply, satellite images are not just scientific; they are cultural as well."

Second, they point out the paradox role of satellite imagery to account for the inequitable impact of COVID-19

"satellite image, from a US satellite operator, locates pandemic “excesses” in an Iranian “elsewhere.” But this is an increasingly deceptive proposition, given that the United States has one of the highest COVID-19 per capita transmission and fatality rates in the world."

Third, they draw comparisons between the "hockey stick" visualization of global Climate Change and the various "curves" used to display COVID-19 developments:

From a disaster media perspective, the film’s global warming graph depicts a dramatic climate shift, projects imminent catastrophe, and issues a world warning. Its circulation in global media culture for the past fifteen years potentially informs the ways people are engaging now with similar-looking charts of coronavirus death and illness. Historically, news media have relied on sensationalistic photos of human suffering to convey a sense of disaster, but in the age of big data and the current pandemic, numbers speak, and graphs and curves tend to dominate the mediascape. In both cases, scientific experts and publics must grapple with how these graphs make meaning, what datasets they rely upon, and how these media come to stand in for highly complex conditions.

Finally, they remark that COVID-19 visualizations are always incomplete - because of lack of testing and withholding of data - but also because stories of e.g. workers are missing. They reference the cover of the New York Times (May 24, 2020) that displayed the names of 100,000 people who had died from COVID.

The article points out the simulation Crimson Contagion that was run by the Department of Health in 2019.

"Despite all of the pressing unknowns of the disease, one cannot call its emergence unpredictable. A simulation by the US Department of Health and Human Services, code-named Crimson Contagion, ran from January through August 2019. The aim was to prepare for the effects of an influenza pandemic. The findings reportedly “drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed” (Sanger et al. 2020)"

They also note the rise in Internet usage, pointing to environmental and energy implications:

"[C]oronavirus capitalism is interwoven with digital capitalism (Schiller 1999; Terranova 2004; Fuchs 2019). The pandemic has prompted a massive rush to online spaces of work and leisure activities. It is estimated that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased total internet use by 70 percent (Beech 2020)."

"Yet with this surge in online activities and virtual gatherings, the COVID-19 crisis has both exacerbated and laid bare the internet’s rising energy dependency, its growing carbon footprint, and issues of energy justice. The challenge is to be able to address crises of various kinds while reducing fossil fuel use especially, and developing sustainable and equitably managed energy sources. There is a burgeoning scholarly literature about the ill effects of the nuclear, petroleum, coal, and hydroelectric energy sources that power the grid and about the environmental devastation their industrial incursions wreak. In the meantime, the impacts of extraction and production of the various energy forms that keep the grid and the internet operating are often toxic and inequitable." 

Finally, they point to the connection between media and health, including civic archiving of HIV activists.

[F]ilm and media scholarship on public health [...] not only serves as crucial context for the COVID-19 pandemic but also extends the conceptual contours of disaster media to include disease and illness, outbreaks and pandemics, and the ways government agencies address or fail to address health-related crises. Alexandra Juhasz’s book AIDS TV (1995) explores community educational initiatives and activist videos that became vital means of conveying information about and perspectives on HIV transmission during the 1980s and '90s and continuing public health crises. Addressing media portrayals of other outbreaks, Kirsten Ostherr’s Cinematic Prophylaxis (2005) critically examines Hollywood films “that represent the spread of contagious disease across national borders.” In it Ostherr argues, “Audiovisual materials play a crucial role in the articulation of world health, not only as vehicles of educational and ideological dissemination, but also as metaphors for the spread of disease within the processes of globalization” (2). Her study sheds light on the current COVID-19 crisis by demonstrating how outbreaks become disaster media.

I teach anthropology and environmental studies at Haveford College, just outside of Philly. Currently, I'm holed up in a cabin in the Adirondacks in upstate New York with several family members, including my spouse and 4 year old daughter and 3 dogs. I started working on disasters by accident, when one day in 2001 I was walking to class at NYU and saw the World Trade Center buildings on flames. I have known Kim for a few year and I contacted her to connect with folks around Covid-19 and its imacts.

I'm particularly intersted in issues of communal grief, mourning, and bereavement. Also, I'm interested in the religious response to Covid-19.