Analyze

In my experience working with archaeologists, I have observed numerous instances where these experts show exceptional dedication to address epistemic injustices that have persisted within the field since its inception. Archaeology has its origins in colonialism and has developed based on what archaeologists considered "impartial" investigations of marginalized communities. In practice, this meant that archaeologists, who were often seen as authorities on the past, crafted narratives based on their own interpretations, emphasizing objects they deemed relevant to their chosen stories. This way of doing archaeology created epistemic injustices that have perpetuated misconceptions and inaccurate narratives about the lives of communities, both in contemporary times and throughout history. Recognizing this problematic historical legacy, archaeologists have recently made significant efforts to integrate the voices and practices of marginalized communities into their work, often through participatory approaches in scientific research. While these endeavors have yielded positive outcomes, challenges persist because the way communities perceive and understand the world (ontologies and epistemologies) is significantly distinct from the way archaeologists, using their scientific methods and theories, perceive and understand the world. Even with the most robust collaborative efforts in place, this distinction persists and may result in the continuation of various epistemic injustices. One notable example is the practice of elevating scientific evidence, affording it greater importance, credibility, and authority, sometimes at the expense of lived experiences and oral histories. Procedural injustices also persist, partly due to the legal framework governing archaeological practices, which primarily aligns with scientific perspectives rather than community perspectives, benefiting the scientific community. For instance, current regulations in certain states in the US permit landowners to have unrestricted control over the archaeological materials excavated on their properties, irrespective of their historical or cultural connection to the original communities to whom these materials belong. Archaeologists have displayed determined efforts to address historical injustices, but there is still a substantial amount of work ahead. As they navigate challenges, some ask themselves a crucial question: Can the practice of archaeology as we know it withstand the profound transformation necessary to emerge as a truly equitable and inclusive discipline? 

Image Description: "My hand and some of the materials I encountered in the field."

Domingues, Amanda. 2023. "Archaelogy and "impartial" investigations of marginalized communities." 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.

Sabina Vaught’s Compulsory challenges conventional understandings of state schooling through an ethnographic exploration of the juvenile prison school system in the United States. Vaught examines the ways in which juvenile prison and prison school are shaped by legal and ideological forces working across multiple state apparatuses. Vaught depicts these forces vividly through her ethnographic focus on Lincoln prison school, a site serving “as a window onto the massive institutional practices of juvenile schooling, knowledge production, and incarceration in the United States” (19). Her ethnography maps the network of relations converging through this site—between prisoners, teachers, state officials and mothers. In doing so, her ethnography captures an illustrative account of the institutional assemblages at work in constituting the state through material and ideological practices of dispossession and education of young Black men. She demonstrates the ways in which the state disproportionally displaces young Black men from home and subjects them to abuse, captivity, and forced submission through its educational apparatus.

 In her approach, Vaught highlights distinct spaces of interest: inside and outside the juvenile prison school system. She works with these designations to map institutional powers across different spaces, arguing that “Inside and Outside are places just as Seattle and Canada are proper nouns with distinct features, bounded space, governing rules, sociocultural symbology, and so on” (12). In mapping these spaces, Vaught is also attentive to who is present and who is absent, both discursively and materially. Absences are recognized as shaping the field in which Vaught is working—for instance, her ethnographic focus on young men in prison schools is largely an outcome of institutional practices of hiding young black women from view. In the logic of prison administrators, “girls were too vulnerable to be exposed to research” (17)—despite paradoxically deemed “dangerous” in justifying their captivity.

Vaught’s attention to absence is also explicit in her examination of removal, as a practice aimed at disrupting the private spheres of people of color through prisons and schools. Removal entails the physical relocation of students from their homes to schools, where “they are subject to meaningless or hostile captive educational performances” (321). Removal, as Vaught demonstrates, is essential to the continuous construction of the US as a White, heteropatriarchal nation.

More specifically, removal disables the possibility of a Black private sphere by disrupting kinship relations between young Black men and their families and making young Black men into prisoners. Removal acts as an assault “on Black women as custodians of the house of resistance, on Black boys as figments of White criminal imaginations who antithetically define White male innocence and citizenship, and on Black girls as both hyperaggressive and broken ghost victims” (321). The state works to supplant other social and family relations with carceral kinship relations, which normalize and legitimize the removal process. This process is further reinforced with the psychological manipulation of young men through state-imposed “treatment,” which corrodes their sense of free will and promotes feelings of internal, individual culpability for their exclusion from citizenship.

Vaught argues that this disruption of Black private spheres is significant because these are important spaces of resistance, in which counter publics are formed. In the United States, “the public” is leveraged as a tool of white supremacist control in limiting the power of some. Rights themselves are exclusive and private—limited to those possessing property, a condition of whiteness dependent on the exclusion of people of Color. Dispossession and education are practices that maintain and rationalize this exclusivity, as young Black men are denied the possibilities of citizenship. These practices serve to protect the interests of the White state, to which the potential emergence of private Black citizens (and their potential publics) act as threats: “White freedom, will, and fitness for self-governance exist only through the ideological and structural denial of those very things in Black people” (322).

In her attention to the interrelations between the white supremacist state, prison schooling, and critical scholarship, Vaught offers direction for activists and scholars invested in social justice and education—particularly in her critique of the school-to-prison pipeline, which draws attention to the limitations of reform. As an apparatus of the state, schools are meant to function as prison pipelines. Scholars and activists applying the prison-to-pipeline logic in advocating for education reform overlook this essential fact and “unintentionally confirm the principal, most damaging misconception of school: that it is good” (37). Vaught’s Compulsory supports and gives life to alternative theoretical approaches focused on the racist organization of schools in relation to prisons. In this, Vaught exemplifies her approach to theory as stewardship: theory is “a stewardship of a kinship network of meaning. It is not just an abstraction we take up and give life to page by page but rather a living force that in some ways takes us up” (41). Ultimately, Vaught’s theoretical stewardship offers meaningful direction for scholars and activists: “State schooling … is the beating heart of a supremacist state. … To take on the heart of the state requires further mapping its reaches” (323).

The documentary is missing because the documentary is as safe as the fence it mocks in its title.
In the beginning we are asked to bear witness to the construction and use of the most devastation weapon of indiscriminate death the world has ever seen, and all the harm the construction of such a tool, yet its construction and its use is justified near instantaneously by repeating the same old propaganda.
In continuation, we are asked to bear witness to the continuous production of similar weapons and the devastation caused by the mishandling of the waste that accumulated in their production, yet why such a production took place is not only left unquestioned, but simple hints of cold war propaganda is left in their places for safekeeping.
In the end, we are asked to bear witness to a sombre victory, same spectres of patriotism and nation-of-God watching over our shoulder, yet how the pitiful situation of being forced to celebrate even such a small victory is never explored.
To sum up, we are shown people, good people, who struggle against the symptoms of a disease, yet this disease itself never named, nor challenged. It could not have been challenged, as it would force a complete change in their discourse.

If we sincerely would like to critique how the bodies of these workers were made disposable; used, harmed, dislocated and discharged as deemed necessary; if we wish to explore this topic as the necropolitical issue it is, we cannot stop halfway through. This inability to stop chasing connections, relationalities wherever it fits our ideology, is not a call for “objectivism”, it’s a call to respect the term of Anthropocene with all its rhizomatic connections.

An investigation of nuclear waste, that does not factor the use of its product, the socio-political effects of said product, and the historical conditions that even led to the possibility of producing it in such ways and such quantities, are of no use for us.  It cannot penetrate the barrier of capitalist realism. If it could, at least a single mention of workers unions would have existed. Instead, it has confessionals by atomic weapons lawyers whose heart goes out to these workers.
An America that refuse to face up to the fact that it is what it is by the great necropolitical project it led for hundreds of years, I struggle to accumulate sympathy for, what I can easily accumulate is rage however, which this documentary is missing..
Wish the documentary would have at least attempted to say something radical, instead of praising these disposable bodies for being patriotic about it. There are lives who never had false fences built as idols for safety, the collective idols of old America, the patriotic nation under God were built upon their broken bodies, what would you ask of them?

One of the reasons for the specific nature of data and knowledge management in this context is the economic necessity and attractiveness of stable, high paying employment. In terms of the beginning of the accumulation of local knowledge regarding the risks to which the workers and the neighbors were being exposed to, this clearly played a role. For fear of losing their good paying jobs, and due to the military nature of their occupation, workers never told anything about their jobs to their families, or didn't ask questions that could have led to uncomfortable answers. This dynamic continued later, as we can see by the testimony of the worker who worked on the clean-up of the Weldon Springs site. The Priest also notes that in the neighborhood, people were wary of information leaking, as it might depreciate their property values.

Something else which we can observe is that, on top of the economic necessity for preserving one's job, there is also a sentiment of pride in doing one's work properly. A worker recalls that the relationship that the workers had to having to wear blue (and reduce your actions because you were contaminated) was that it was just part the job, and that they had a job to do. After the Weldon springs plant closed, there was a liberation of voices, and it was easier to report health concerns. The sentiment of pride in doing ones work properly is completed by a sentiment of patriotism. The same worker, Mr Schneider, said: "We have to believe what our government tells us, what the heck, uh. Best country in the world, I still think it is." Another example of the relationship between the job and the risk is the testimony of the clean-up worker who said that they shut of their Geiger counters, because they were "just going nuts". Here we can see that when the risk is too high, it becomes less visible, less understandable, because it is inescapable. Another reason for the difficulty of accumulating and sharing information, at least until the 1990s, is the priority of beating the communists. The discourse of emergency and national priority is not conducive to asking questions (as we can observe today in different ways).

The closing of the Weldon Springs plant coincided with the rise of environmental concerns in the USA and the change in environmental perspective had an impact on the categorization of places such as the Weldon Springs one, which became a Superfund site. This required a change in management at the department of energy because they started needing to have conversations and interactions with the public. This did not solve all the knowledge management problems however, because the measures put in place to deal with the injustices were insufficient compared to the nature of the events that had unfolded.

This is for multiple reasons. The first the nature of the risk means that the production of knowledge and regulations was complicated by a lack of understanding of the different medical pathways, conditions, and interactions which lead to the development of health problems. The number of people affected is also quite small, so the statistics may not appear to be significant. The second is the complexity of the accumulation of data in order to gain reparation and recognition, something which led to a movement to make the process more collective, in order to support the data finding and management process and make the knowledge of the administrative procedures consolidated. Finally, there were instances where the records of employee exposure were falsified, which meant that the access to this information was impossible.

One question that is brought up in the documentary which compelled me is the quesiton of knowing how to mark the borders of acceptable risk. While at the beginning of the nuclear production operations, the question is not raised so much, it comes into play later, when the environmental movements have influenced the governance of the USA enough that the clean-up becomes a question answerable through policy. It is at that point that multiple tensions arise. First, there is the tension between the perception of risk that the workers who worked in the factories had and the outwards sign of protection that the workers doing the clean up wear. And second, once risk is acknowledged, a tension arises related to the extent of risk, and the areas which need to be protected.  As the priest recalls,  people visiting the clean-up site, were in laymen's clothing on one side of the fence, and on the other side of the fence, people were in moon suits. Similarly, a clean-up worker recalls that the houses where they stayed during their time at work were just on the other side of the fence from the clean up site where they had to wear protective gear.

Another tension which intrigued me in this documentary is between the representation of exposed workers as heroes and as victims. This is something which arises of another context which is mentioned in this documentary which is the military, and some of the exposed workers are veterans. Faced with life altering situations, it is without a doubt useful to have a construction which permits the making of meaning and the perception of oneself as honorable, but it should be investigated what the impact of patriotism and loyalty to country is on perception of risk and injustice. 

The last question which intrigued me in this documentary is that of the construction of the deterrent/protective structure on the nuclear waste site. The priest raises an interesting point when he asks whether the best use of the money spent was in constructing this structure that would, according to him, be attractive to children, instead of providing financial support and health care to the people affected by the radiation. It really made me question the value of creating an attractive memorial like structure, and the discourse it conveys on the nature of the events which unfolded there. And of course, the classic question of the management of essential message bearing structures that wil long outlive us.

The original labor of this quotidian Anthropocene is the labor of weapon production. The economy of war produced a situation where workers' security or the environment was absolutely not the main priority. As someone said in the documentary, there was no reason for workers not to be protected as early as 1942. After the war, work had to be put in to construct more permanent buildings which would improve worker safety and allow better control of the uranium purification process. Another form of labor was put in to structure the practices of control of worker's contamination.

Another labor, which was provoked by the anthropocenics in this situation is that of the medical professionals who surrounded and treated the workers. For example, Mr Schneider's first cancer was discovered by his chiropractor.

Another provoked labor is the activist labor of the workers, children and activist who are impacted by the health risks of working in those factories. The paperwork and administrative labor required to obtain compensation for health impacts is very high, and requires expert help, organizing in a collective was another labor which permitted the previous ones, and allowed for the pooling of ressources and knowledge to properly defend the rights of workers. A labor which is related to this one is the labor of workers' unions to fight for accurate representation of the risks entailed by the employment of their members and to support the protection of workers.

Related to the labor within the factories themselves is the labor of clean-ups, which contained some of the same risks, with more protection and less exposure time than the original problem producing labor. There is also the labor of knowledge production and risk assessment by individual workers who were coerced in putting their livelihoods above their health. One worker says he had severe nosebleeds on the job and was warned/threatened by his supervisor that he would be fired if he told someone about it.

The final labor that I noticed being covered in this documentary is the labor of everyday clean up. Some people recall cleaning radioactive dust off of their laundry that they set to dry outside, and someone else recalls her brother cleaning the dust off his car in the morning.

At Madison Site, the residents of Calpin streets compiled data of residents living nearby the plant that got cancer. So this was a kind of data collection/ archiving of the residents. They had a list of the illnesses of residents near the plant and they found over 70 cases of cancer on the Calpin streets and 114 Cases of Cancer in the surrounding blocks (around 1h24min). Through this data collection, it was possible for residents to become active and gain the knowledge about what is going on: they became informed and political in this way.

That the body of the workers acts as an indicator for safety conditions at their workplace can also be seen in this film. Particularly impressive I found the passage (approx. at min 30), where it is said that the employees who were too strongly exposed to the radiation and therefore were dismissed, after their dismissal still received their wage – but, as the person interviewed stresses, not due to charity, but to prevent that this worker does urine and blood tests in order to get a new job. Cause in these urine and blood tests the too high levels of exposure in the former plant could become visible – and the company wanted to impede that this happens. So I think what is very interesting here, is the fact, that the exposure is inscribed in the body – and that this is not something, that leads into an action of protecting this body or to a fundamental change of how this work is done – but lead the companies to hide this inscription when it is in their interest.

What kind of monitoring was used to monitor the amount of exposition to radiation (or, “occupational gamma doses”)? In the film they talk about badges, so I did a little research about what these badges are. I found out, that usually, these badges were TLD (Thermoluminescent dosimeter) badges. Murphy and Goel write on Radiopedia: TLD “is a passive radiation detection device that is used for personal dose monitoring or to measure patient dose”. They work as the following: When radiation falls on TLD, electrons are excited and store energy. After a defined period, for example a few months to a year, the badges are evaluated: The reader is a heater, on getting heated, the excited elevtrons come back to the ground state and emit light in doing so, this light is read by a photomultiplier. Light output is proportional to the radiation exposure (Murphy & Goel).  As Clarence R. Schneider (Health and Safety Representative for Electricians) explains (around min 24), the badges they used went to lab every night, if they weren’t “normal”, the workers were not allowed to work at the process areas the next day, they had to use a blue uniform this day and work in another area. So, this monitoring for me has some similarities with a diagnosis: a sample is sent to a laboratory and the next day you know if you are “normal” and can proceed as every day or not. And if not, then the consequence is that you can't work as usual the next day - that you then also got too much radiation, and were more exposed to the risk of illness, that didn't matter to the workers, Schneider says here. After all, it was their job. Later in the film, around 1h19min, Bill Hoppe, a plant worker, also talks about the badges: he stresses that they were supposed to have badges and other security material, but in fact, they did not have it.

Murphy, A. & Goel, A.: Thermoluminescent dosimeter. Available at https://radiopaedia.org/articles/thermoluminescent-dosimeter, last accessed on 18.05.2021.

Towards the end of the film, the ongoing situation of workers at Honeywell/Metropolis is introduced. One workers union, the USW (United Steels Workers), is protesting working conditions and exposure to toxic materials at the plant. They report that workers were locked out after protesting working conditions. They organize protests on the streets in proximity to the plant and march together at the parade on labor day. USW representatives report difficulties of processing complaints of residual contamination because documents were missing, of the processed claims mentioned in the film only 124 were approved while 205 were denied. One health physisist reports about the entrenched bureaucratic culture and that doctors were trained to testify against workers who made health claims, he seems to be very concerned about this as it exposes workers to dangerous working conditions. I think that unionizing as collborative action is a very powerful and effective approach, and think it would be important for health physicists and plant workers to organize together rather than fighting on their own (as it seems to be the case currently).