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.

Ernesto Yerena Montejano, currently a Boyle Heights resident and originally from Imperial County, and his team of fellow artists Arlene Mejorado and Ayerim Leon — complete with friends and families" painted the mura.

It belongs to the Imperial Valley, but was one of 14 California commissions art projects as part of a collaboration between the Governor's Office, CA Dept of Public Health and The Center at Sierra Health Foundation. The commissioning program aimed to raise awareness about Covid19 within the State's hardest hit areas. Each an governmental agency stakeholder in the project along with curators who selected the artist for this mural.

The building's owner, which appears to be a someone poised to sell it soon is also a stakeholder and most importantly, local resident are active stakeholders as they began adding names of family members who died because of Covid on the western corner of the mural unprompted and without explicit instruction or permission.

The mural is located at 739 N. Imperial Avenue in El Centro. It is precariously positioned because although the current owner of the building has promised to protect it for the next 6 months (per Jun 10, 2021), the next owner of the building may cover over the mural. The mural was completed over 1 week by 5+ painters under the direction of  the artist Ernesto Yerena Montejano on May 30, 2021.

It brings together community members to commorate the toll Covid 19 has taken on the community. It provides a public service message to continue masking and thereby taking care of the community. And it adds an element of beauty and artfulness to what was a run-down building exterior

The mural covers the entire side of one building. The background is painted in purples, blue and yellow. One side of the wall is painted "Protege A Nuestra Comunidad!"|"Protect our Community!"

The centerpiece of the mural both figuratively and literally is a beautiful woman (anywhere beteween 20-40yo) in traditional dress with two long strands of brown braided hair holding a bouquet of colorful flowers tied together with a yellow sash. She is wear a face mask to back up the Covid-19 theme.

The flowers she holds is both a reference to the business--"Cynthia's Flower Connection" which has since moved as well as a tribute to the community and their deceased members who died of Covid. One indication is that community members began adding names to the side of the mural as a tribute to lost family members.

This mural is a public-works project commissioned by the State and agencies. It was created by an artist who has ties to the area. It is also meant to be a public health message, another way to reach local residents who have been "locked in"

“Right away we saw how powerful the mural was in bringing people together, especially after this year where we've been locked in and it's been hard to communicate with our community,” he said. Per David Varela, “People are slowly making their way to the mural and are able to mourn a little bit too,” Varela said. “It's really healthy to mourn and I think people are getting a chance to do that through the mural. I knew we'd not only get a beautiful mural, but a powerful message.”