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

Elizabeth Hoover is an anthropologist and associate professor of environmental science, policy and management at Berkley, who long claimed to be native (receiving grants and research access under this assumption) but has recently admitted otherwise. She has a PhD in anthropology from Brown University  with a focus on Environmental and critical Medical Anthropology. 

Katsi Cook, Mother’s Milk Project, collecting samples of breast milk: “Katsi has described this work as “barefoot epidemiology,” with Indigenous women developing their own research projects based on community concerns and then collecting their own data.” (90) - 61? – used a private lab to analyze samples because women did not trust the New York State Health Department

“Barefoot epidemiology” is a concept borrowed from China’s “barefoot doctors”—community-level health workers who brought basic care to China’s countryside in the mid-twentieth century. Hipgrave, “Communicable Disease Control.” According to a “workers’ manual” published by the International Labour Organization, barefoot research is often qualitative, and qualitative research is not the standard approach for conducting health studies, which tend to be based on laboratory experiments and clinical findings. See Keith et al., Barefoot Research” (294)

Civic Dislocation: “In many instances Mohawks experienced what Sheila Jasanoff calls “civic dislocation,” which she defines as a mismatch between what governmental institutions were supposed to do for the public, and what they did in reality. In the dislocated state, trust in government vanished and people looked to other institutions . . . for information and advice to restore their security. It was as if the gears of democracy had spun loose, causing citizens, at least temporarily, to disengage from the state” (118) 

“Dennis Wiedman describes these negative sociocultural changes and structures of disempowerment as “chronicities of modernity,” which produce everyday behaviors that limit physical activities while promoting high caloric intake and psychosocial stress” (235)

Third space of sovereignty: “This tension that arises when community members challenge political bodies while simultaneously demanding that they address the issues of the community has been theorized by political scientist Kevin Bruyneel, who describes how for centuries Indigenous political actors have demanded rights and resources from the American settler state while also challenging the imposition of colonial rule on their lives. He calls this resistance a “third space of sovereignty” that resides neither inside nor outside the American political system, but exists on the very boundaries of that system.” (259)

“Akwesasne residents’ main criticism of the Mount Sinai study was that at its conclusion, the researchers packed up and left, and community members felt they had not received any useful information.” (76) 

“As scholars of tribal health risk evaluation Stuart Harris and Barbara Harper explain, among most tribal people, individual and collective well-being comes from being part of a healthy community with access to heritage resources and ancestral lands, which allow community members to satisfy the personal responsibilities of participating in traditional activities and providing for their families.” (96)

“By placing “race/ethnicity” on a list of diabetes causes without qualifying why it is there, the CDC neglects the underlying root cause—that race/ethnicity is often associated also with class, education, levels of stress, and access to health care and fresh foods.” (231)

“Chaufan argues that to counter the focus on the medicalized aspects of diabetes, which has led to the individualization and depoliticization of the issue, a political ecology framework needs to be applied to the disease, one that is concerned with the social, economic, and political institutions of the human environments where diabetes is emerging.39 Such a framework would highlight how diabetes rates among Mohawk people are influenced more by changes in the natural environment and home environments than by genetic makeup.” (231 - 232)

“Understanding community conceptions of this intertwined “social and biological history” is important because, as Juliet McMullin notes, examining the intersections of health, identity, family, and the environment helps to “denaturalize biomedical definitions of health and moves us toward including knowledge that is based on a shared history of sovereignty, capitalist encounters, resistance, and integrated innovation.”61 The inclusion of this knowledge can lead to the crafting of interventions that community members see as addressing the root causes of their health conditions and promoting better health.” (249)

Hoover’s book is an analysis of the material and psychosocial effects of industrial pollution along the St. Lawrence River, which runs through the Mohawk community of Akwesasne. Hoover focuses on resistance to private and state efforts at land enclosures and economic rearrangements.  Hoover shows how legacy of industrialization and pollution (GM and Alocoa, primarily) ruptured Mohawk relationships with the river, and incurred on tribal sovereignty by disturbing the ability to safely farm, garden, raise livestock, gather, and recreate in ways fostered important connections between and amongst people and the land (“ecocultural relationships”). Hoover describes how confusion about risk and exposure is culturally produced and develops the "Three Bodies" analytic framework to show how individual, social and political bodies are entangled in the process of social and biophysical suffering. 

Hoover also highlights how in response to pollution, Mohawk projects of resistance emerged - a newspaper, documentary films, and  community-based health impacts research. Hoover conducts a comparative history of two research projects tracking the effects on industrial-chemical contamination on Akwesasne people and wildlife: the Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s epidemiological study in the 1980s, which failed to engage Akwesasne people in the production of knowledge or share results meaningfully, and the SUNY-Albany School of Public Health Superfund Basic Research Program study (in the 1990s and 200s), which ultimately began incorporating key theoretical and methodological principles of CBPR.

BIOETHNOGRAPHY: “Thus, instead of combining objects of inquiry (biology and culture), I conceived of bioethnography as combining two different methods for knowing the world (Mol 2002, 153)—ethnographic observation and biochemical sampling—in order to ask and answer research questions that could not be addressed through either method alone. This methodological focus involves exploring how our data collection and analysis might be shaped if we suspended the nature/culture binary” (Roberts, 2021, p. 2)

“bioethnography asks, what if we created numbers otherwise, upending the cooked data that reinforces inequality? In fact, bioethnography can enable us to identify structural forces, such as NAFTA and the global health apparatus itself, that are part of the bodily processes that make ill health. In other words, while we know that all data is cooked, it matters how it’s cooked.” (Roberts, 2021, p. 5)

Roberts describes their ongoing bioethnographic collaboration with a team of exposure scientists who are working in environmental engineering and health. Though ethnography is not easily enumerated, Roberts emphasizes that integrating it with quantitative data is worthwhile and makes for “better numbers”. As an example, Roberts describes 3 bioethnographic projects on neighborhoods, water distribution, and employment and chemical exposures. These projects were part of a longitudinal birth-cohort study in Mexico City called Early Life Exposures in Mexico to ENvironmental Toxicants (ELEMENT), created to understand the effects of early-life nutrition and exposure to toxicants (such as lead and phenols). Overtime, this project was expanded to include the study of new toxins (e.g. BPAS, mercury, and fluoride) and new health concerns (e.g. obesity, meopause, sleep).

Roberts’ focus on neighborhoods was produced from the ethnographic observation that neighborhood characteristics might influence exposure levels. Following this observation, Roberts’ and ELEMENT researchers sorted participants by neighborhood and identified significant differences in blood-lead levels. Additionally, Roberts applied previous ethnographic observation and scholarship to argue that high levels of toxicants like lead correlate with the capacity of neighborhoods to withstand other dangers, such as police violence. These findings prompted the development of two new bioethnographic project centered on water and the effect of neighborhood dynamics on health.

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