Analyze

The project "Researching Kaohsiung Archive: practice and reflection" is a collaborative effort with the UCI team addressing the global environmental injustice record in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, particularly focusing on the slow and accumulative harm caused by petrochemical development. Under the Environmental Injustice Global Record (EIGR) website, the Kaohsiung Archive serves as a trans-disciplinary platform for data archiving and communication. Since joining in 2021, the team has collected and visualized diverse data sources, engaging stakeholders in collaboration. The archive development involves addressing key questions related to environmental justice studies, fostering brainstorming and reflection. The project acts as a boundary object, connecting local and international communities, providing an information infrastructure for social dialogue,and aiming to contribute to a sustainable transformation discourse on the risks of petrochemical developments in Kaohsiung. The long-term impact on academic production method and knowledge dissemination remains to be seen, but the project aspires to inspire co-creation, cross-border cooperation,and innovation to empower civil society and enhance environmental justice governance.

The creation of the Kaohsiung Archive begins with a series of questions, utilizing the Environmental Justice (EJ) study framework applied to Hawaii as a guide. These questions delve into the influence of industries on environmental governance and advocacy, exploring the strategiesemployed. The process involves collaborative efforts to answer these questions, fostering brainstorming, debates, and reflections on characterizing the setting and revealing environmental injustice within the case study.

Following workshops and fieldwork in Kaohsiung, the project evolved to formulate narrative structures for mapping and visualizing environmental injustice in the region. Objectives include outlining Kaohsiung's features, focusing on petrochemical-related air pollution and industrial transformation issues, and designing relays to illustrate the challenges faced by fence-line communities and showcase potential action initiatives.

The project's progression involves tracking the issue, identifying and categorizing stakeholders, as well as gathering information and experiences from various parties. Stakeholder claims are sorted out, and efforts are made to find common action goals. Discursive risk analysis is conducted, examining environmental monitoring issues around petrochemical facilities. For instance, in Dashe, there is a focus on the discursive gaps between local residentsand petrochemical workers, revealing disparities in perceptions of air quality and expectations regarding governmental control.

Source

Tu, Wen Ling. 2023. " Researching Kaohsiung Archive: Practice and Reflection." 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.

New social and environmental obligations are now imposed on transnational companies. They are now responsible for the concrete implementation of these obligations and are developing a set of practices to measure, prevent and remedy their environmental impact. These “corporate transition policies” (Lhulier & Tenreira, 2023) are at the frontier of law, management and natural sciences (mapping, indicators, thresholds), thus constitutive of a new co-produced scientific-normative space. A qualitative Science & Technology (STS) analysis on the basis of corporate documents and other collective practices is useful in order to describe this “corporate assemblages” (Tenreira, 2023), especially using Jasanoff's four-tiered analysis. The case study analysis reveals that the firm Decathlon refers to the 9 planetary limits ("experts/identities" N°1). It also refers to "institutions" (N°2) such as Sciences Based Target. The analysis of the "discourses" (N°3) shows that Decathlon's commitment actually appears largely declarative. The firm falls short of adopting concrete methodologies for calculating its ecological footprint, thereby highlighting a gap between rhetoric and action. This discrepancy presents a unique "representation" (N°4) of science, which permits the company a considerable degree of latitude in employing or constructing scientific indicators according to its “discretion”. At this stage of the analysis, it is thus possible to “problematize” (Laurent, 2022) corporate objects as corporate assemblages. The next steps of the analysis would nevertheless require other methodological approaches to “assess reflexively” these assemblages regarding an “rhizomatic ecological reality”.

Image : Tomas Saraceno, "Galaxies Forming along Filaments, Like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web", 2009, in Bruno Latour

Tenreira, Luca. 2023. "The construction of an episteme of objectification of corporate practices in the field of transition." 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.

The project "Researching Kaohsiung Archive: practice and reflection" is a collaborative effort with the UCI team addressing the global environmental injustice record in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, particularly focusing on the slow and accumulative harm caused by petrochemical development. Under the Environmental Injustice Global Record (EIGR) website, the Kaohsiung Archive serves as a trans-disciplinary platform for data archiving and communication. Since joining in 2021, the team has collected and visualized diverse data sources, engaging stakeholders in collaboration. The archive development involves addressing key questions related to environmental justice studies, fostering brainstorming and reflection. The project acts as a boundary object, connecting local and international communities, providing an information infrastructure for social dialogue,and aiming to contribute to a sustainable transformation discourse on the risks of petrochemical developments in Kaohsiung. The long-term impact on academic production method and knowledge dissemination remains to be seen, but the project aspires to inspire co-creation, cross-border cooperation,and innovation to empower civil society and enhance environmental justice governance.

The creation of the Kaohsiung Archive begins with a series of questions, utilizing the Environmental Justice (EJ) study framework applied to Hawaii as a guide. These questions delve into the influence of industries on environmental governance and advocacy, exploring the strategiesemployed. The process involves collaborative efforts to answer these questions, fostering brainstorming, debates, and reflections on characterizing the setting and revealing environmental injustice within the case study.

Following workshops and fieldwork in Kaohsiung, the project evolved to formulate narrative structures for mapping and visualizing environmental injustice in the region. Objectives include outlining Kaohsiung's features, focusing on petrochemical-related air pollution and industrial transformation issues, and designing relays to illustrate the challenges faced by fence-line communities and showcase potential action initiatives.

The project's progression involves tracking the issue, identifying and categorizing stakeholders, as well as gathering information and experiences from various parties. Stakeholder claims are sorted out, and efforts are made to find common action goals. Discursive risk analysis is conducted, examining environmental monitoring issues around petrochemical facilities. For instance, in Dashe, there is a focus on the discursive gaps between local residentsand petrochemical workers, revealing disparities in perceptions of air quality and expectations regarding governmental control.

Tu, Wen Ling. 2023. " Researching Kaohsiung Archive: Practice and Reflection." 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.

This film focuses on the environmental and social problem of having large gas (lethal) plants near cities or other populated areas where people can be harmed. Environmentally these gasses are no good because they are emitted into the air and are very soluble in the water which leads to ocean acidification. Ocean acidification makes it so that the ocean has a lower pH level, this can harm marine wildlife. Socially, the gas is toxic to people and as seen in the Bhopal tragedy, it can kill people or severely alter their lives. This could be seen through the immediate deaths of civilians, deformities of children born after the incident, and the families affected even years after hoping for justice.

From watching the video, I feel affected emotionally because it was definitely hard to watch so many people die, especially the innocent children. It is a hard pill to swallow to watch the lives of so many people taken away from them so unexpectedly in their own homes. I feel affected by seeing the photo of the unknown child because it was hauntingly touching as it was for so many people that advocated for justice after this tragedy. It was also really daunting seeing so many people being buried and burned in mass because they were not granted the ability to be respectfully honored for their death which I think is something very valuable. Intellectually I think that this film made me think about how this tragedy could have been possibly prevented if the plant had been maintained and checked up on regularly or if the plant wasn’t so close to a whole city in the first place. And I also feel gratitude to those who are still advocating for justice for the victims and trying to get people with government power to make that change.