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Santiago, Chile

Misria

Despite the current level of development of communications, which has managed to connect distant geographies in high quality of image and sound, the possibility of traveling and seeing people and places is still an amazing experience. It is therefore not surprising that, despite the crisis that the aviation and tourism industry experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of flights has increased today. However, these trends are in contrast to the climate crisis scenario in which air mobility appears as one of the main contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. It is therefore worth asking, what factors sustain this scenario and invite us to continue to prefer aircraft as a means of transportation? While the reasons for traveling are multiple, there is one central element: the fascination that exists behind travel. This fascination seems to be a constituent part of the human being, driven by the desire to overcome our limitations and soar through the skies in search of new latitudes. But this fascination is also driven through a collective imaginary that has been built and sustained, starting with the story of Icarus and Daedalus, and continued with countless references in popular culture that make us look to the skies and let ourselves be carried away by those desires to have wings and fly. Something that is even deeper in a country like Chile and in a city like Santiago, so far from the rest of the world and flanked by the Andes Mountains, where flying seems to be the only way to expand our borders. It is this imaginary, which seems to raise few controversies in the country, that faces the future that the aviation industry offers us, one that promises to populate our skies with different types of flying artifacts, in an image that however does not seem alien, since it has been fueled by science fiction, becoming established as the obvious path to follow. In the face of this scenario, one of the biggest questions that arises is how this reconfiguration of the skies that the aviation industry promises will be inserted within a climate crisis scenario like the one we live in, in which phenomena such as the change in the migratory patterns of birds appears as a real danger to this imaginary and that already worries the world of aviation. These are the questions that hide an imaginary as powerful as the one that the image I have chosen suggests, and in whose development Chile and its hydrogen have a lot to say and a lot to reflect on. 

Catalán Hidalgo, René. 2023. "(Mis)controlling the Atmosphere: Aeromobility-Meteorology Symbiosis, Implications and Unforeseen Consequences." 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.

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tamar.rogoszinski

According to Google Scholar, this article has only been cited once. The publication's name is "Documenting Attacks on Health Workers and Facilities in Armed Conflicts." This publication discusses attacks on health facilities and workers in Afghanistan, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic and Yemen.

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tamar.rogoszinski

The authors range from a variety of institutions including: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in Sweden, Karolinska Institute in Sweden, Fafo Research Institute in Norway, and King's College London in the UK. The main author, Ludvig Foghammar, seems to have a lot of knowledge in economics, political science, and global health (according to his LinkedIn). He has served as Officer for European Affairs for the Swedish Embassy in Vienna, and a researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. 

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tamar.rogoszinski

The methods used in this paper include interviews from 11 different representatives of organizations working in complex security environments, information from research workshops that included researchers and practitioners in the fields of health and humanitarian aid delivery and policy, and overall analysis of organizational efforts made to address this type of violence.

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tamar.rogoszinski

The authors discuss that there is little information regarding this topic because there is a lack of research. This is pointed out by the fact that they could only find 38 articles that related to this topic. They also point out that there is an urgency for an analysis regarding the impact of this violence on the facilities, organizations, and on the populations that benefitted from the humanitarian presence. 

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tamar.rogoszinski
  1. "At the same time, academic research is often communicated in a format that fails to address the critical policy issues facing aid organizations."
  2. "Because reporting often focuses on the most serious attacks, such as kidnapping and fatalities, workshop participants stressed that incidents perceived to be less severe, such as threats and obstructions, are more likely to be underreported. For this reason it is important to better understand the impact of perceived threats."
  3. "Workshop participants also noted examples of violence linked to situations where the medical treatment provided has not met patients’ expectations or was unsatisfactory in other ways."
  4. "Although violence directly affecting health service delivery in complex security environments has received a great deal of media attention, there is very little publically available research, particularly peer-reviewed, original research. Only thirty-eight articles met the original search criteria outlined in the methods section, of which only eleven contained original research; a further citation search yielded another four original research articles. The remainder was comprised of review articles, commentaries, letters, or analysis based on secondary sources."

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tamar.rogoszinski

While this article does not really address emergency response, the discussion of violent attacks on humanitarian workers does involve emergency responders and can affect how humanitarians provide care. So while not direct, this article does have implications for emergency responders in those regions.