Analyze

the floor of the valley has dropped in recent decades with increased groundwater pumping by farms, meaning more land might be subject to inundation,

Flood protection in California is largely a local affair, with water agencies, special districts and private companies building and maintaining the infrastructure. Smaller towns, like those in the San Joaquin Valley, often don’t have the money to develop their own levee systems, and while the state and federal government help out, winning investment from them isn’t easy.

The Tulare Lake basin also doesn’t have major Army Corps of Engineers flood projects to buffer large amounts of water as do some areas such as the Sacramento region.

The current crisis is the opposite of the usual one--instead of fighting over who gets access to water, groups are fighting over how to get rid of it.

Farmers, residents, municipal work crews, and hired contractors are reinforcing levees, pumping out excess water, and evacuating livestock, equipment, and homes.

One group was hired to protect a supply warehouse 3 miles south of Corcoran.

J.G. Boswell Company, which mainly produces cotton, owns most of the lowlands that are the Tulare Lake bed. They have allowed some fields to flood in efforts to protect other areas (the most productive farmland). The County Board of Supervisors forced them to cut another levee and flood more land because they weren't doing enough to protect populated areas.

"Flood protection in California is largely a local affair, with water agencies, special districts and private companies building and maintaining the infrastructure. Smaller towns, like those in the San Joaquin Valley, often don’t have the money to develop their own levee systems, and while the state and federal government help out, winning investment from them isn’t easy. The Tulare Lake basin also doesn’t have major Army Corps of Engineers flood projects to buffer large amounts of water as do some areas such as the Sacramento region."

Tulare lake used to be the largest body of water east of the Mississipppi. It had ports, steamships, elk and antelope. 40 different Yokut groups lived on its shores.

• The process of designing curriculum is quite useful as it details how different activities correspond to learning goals in science, mathematics, and technology. Fig. 3 describes the steps: selecting content through content specialists in the POAC team, making a curriculum outline, individual meetings with content specialists, and making the lesson plans. I really like the activities they designed, such as comparing different mask materials and how they protected against differently-sized viruses. They were also given time to research career pathways and present on epidemiology careers, a step that invites students to imagine career pathways. 

• I realize the scope and audience of this paper is different, but I am so curious about how the Imhotep Academy created a setting that encouraged underrepresented students to participate and speak up, given that they cite evidence of how difficult that can be. How did they choose participants? 

• Having read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed recently, I am thinking about his approach to curriculum design that is based on a feedback loop between would-be learners and would-be educators. The roles of learners and educators aren’t fixed. Content development is not done beforehand just by content specialists but in an iterative process with multiple feedback loops. Since very few research teams have the time or the resources to deploy Freire’s rigorous approach, I am not surprised that most curriculum development does not follow the route. And educators are working with former experiences anyway. So I am curious about how the authors’ previous experiences shaped their approach to curriculum design?

• A context for this paper is the controversy on the proposed revisions to the California math curriculum that conservative media outlets argue “waters down” calculus–a cherry topping on the college admissions cake–to privilege data science in middle-school grades. Education researchers contend that apart from physics and engineering majors, not many colleges actually require calculus for admissions (many private institutions do), and that the relevance of advanced calculus for college preparation is overrated. 

• National Commission on Excellence in Education ‘s 1983 report Nation At Risk: the need for a new STEM workforce specializing in computer science and technology 

• National Council on Mathematics 2000 guidelines for preparing American students for college in Common Core Mathematics 

• Stuck in the Shallow End: Virtual segregation; Inequality in learning computer science in American schools focusing on Black students 

So much has happened in Kenya in the last months. Police brutality has skyrocketed and has reached an all time high.  (Watch this video documentary and read this article).

The government has come under fire for their poor response to the crisis. The leader of the opposition: Raila Odinga has launched a new 'coronavirus certificate', which has come under heavy criticism. Some believe that obtaining this certificate could be a barrier to access to jobs. A person could get infected after being tested etc.

There have been other stories such as the President and the Chief Justice  battling on Twitter (Link), the internal politics of the Nairobi County government re budget allocation and conflicts about leadership (Link). The detainment of workers who've come back to Kenya in quarantine centers (Link) etc.

All of these stories need to be told. But journalist and writer Nanjala Nyabola reminds us: what are the stories that are not being given airtime, and will not be part of the Kenyan archive and imagination (Link)? Stories such as the amazing protest art in Nairobi (Link), or the way communities have come together during this time, or the work that the Mathare Social Justice Center has been doing to fight police violence (Link). There is a need to amplify, tell and retell these stories too.

So the main 'slowdown' of the economy as well as the 'lockdown' of people appears to come to an end. It's been three exceptional months, as for instance emphasized by altered mobility patterns. (See https://www.covid-19-mobility.org/current-mobility/) However, what do we make out of this?

I would like to propose the following argument: The global health crisis of SARS-CoV-2 triggered a new public engagement with the polluted world produced and inhabited by humans. Media reports and preliminary scientific studies showed how pollution parameters decreased significantly and people visited public parks to a previously unknown extent. A debate on healthy clean air popped up, which was further strengthened by measures to contain the pandemic. Publicly discussed scientific studies suggest a correlation between COVID vulnerability and air pollution; and through hygiene measures, the mask has become popular as an object of protection, which in many societies was previously known primarily as protection against air pollution in public spaces. A few authors even claimed that air pollution should be indentified as a pandemic as well, a non-communicable pandemic with a significant toll.

We know perfectly well that air pollution is a slow disaster that is hard to account for. Threshold limits are not enough. The unequal consequences are not well appreciated, let alone translated into sufficient action. The pandemic experiences might help cherish clean air; it could help in producing clean and healthy air as a common good.

This is just a start, but I'm thinking about doing more research on that topic. One possible approach would be to discuss the "clean air experience" cross-culturally (like we do during the calls), while analysing and drawing on public (social media/media) discussions to enact clean air as a value. In turn, this could help bring pollution prevention and accountability to the forefront.

Guidelines and Contingency planning for 2020-2021 School year:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-08/new-guidelines-say-school-year-will-see-some-california-students-learning-from-home
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/teacher-health-fall-schools-coronavirus/2020/06/05/12bf261a-99f9-11ea-ac72-3841fcc9b35f_story.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/06/04/fauci-whole-bunch-things-can-be-done-reopen-schools/

https://edsource.org/2020/classes-outside-face-coverings-and-one-way-hallways-how-los-angeles-schools-may-reopen/632399
https://www.npr.org/2020/05/26/858257200/the-pandemic-is-driving-americas-schools-toward-a-financial-meltdown
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/05/26/future-public-education-is-stake-an-open-letter-joe-biden-215-school-advocates/



Graduation: 

from NYT times on how to celebrate your HS graduation: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/style/self-care/graduation-celebration-pandemic.html


Remote Learning & Student Achievement

https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/education/education-interruptions-student-achievement/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/us/coronavirus-education-lost-learning.html

students with disabilities: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-25/coronavirus-school-special-education





In news reports from New York Times, to Los Angeles Times, to Navajo Times, as Indigenous nations of the United States respond to the impacts of the “Novel Coronavirus 2019” (COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2), they are calling out the re-emergence of an old, long-standing problem. During a recent interview, Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez said, “We are United States citizens but we’re not treated like that. You can hear the frustration, the tone of my voice. We, once again, have been forgotten by our own government” (NPR “Morning Edition,” April 24, 2020).

In this blind spot of the federal government, and despite the ignorance of the current administration, national news coverage has made the Navajo Nation (Dinétah) an “epicenter” in the popular imaginary of the so-called “Native impact” of COVID-19, which refers to the disproportionate rates of infection and compounding vulnerabilities in Indigenous nations across the United States. As the most populous “American Indian Tribe” in the US with approximately 325,000 people who identify as Diné, a broad range of news outlets found it fitting to compare the per-capita infection rates of COVID-19 in the Navajo Nation with U.S. states, ranking it the third highest behind New Jersey and New York. In the absence of the federal government, state governors and departments have also begun to grapple with the numbers. New Mexico Department of Health (NMDOH) calculates the disparity of the “Native impact” in their public release of the state’s new COVID-19 data portal through a “Statewide Race/Ethnicity Breakdown” of the 3,513 recorded cases of infections in New Mexico: 53.41% “American Indian/Alaska Native”; 19.81% “Hispanic/Latino”; 15.81% “White” (accessed May 2, 2020).

From local to global news coverage of the coronavirus, one of the first questions asked about the impacts of the pandemic in particular places is: “What are the numbers?” The numbers prompt a pathological analysis, both biomedical and sociological. Although the biomedical pathology may be warranted, social pathology and discourse that pathologizes “culture” remain risky. This reportage on “the numbers” is part of the process Audra Simpson calls “the analytics of ‘minoritization,’ a statistical model for the apprehension of (now) racialized populations ‘within’ nation-states” (as cited in 2014:18; see 2011:211). It is part of the same state calculus in the etymology of the word “statistic” that was used historically to apprehend Diné people, capturing them categorically and spatially. In this collection of annotations, the numbers open up a different kind of analysis that leverages the concept of “minoritization” to turn a static category into an active and lively process of emergence and change, and account for the processes that attempt to make “minorities.”

In order to understand the impacts of and responses to the pandemic, the compound vulnerabilities, responsibility and resilience, we need to shift our gaze from a statistical and pathological view of the impact in the Navajo Nation to broader inter- and extra-governmental relations and infrastructures. Four relations of governance across geographic and institutional scales seem important to me: (1) U.S. federal government’s responsibility in recognizing and realizing the rights of Indigenous nations as stipulated in United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, as well as state and federal treaties and contracts; (2) how neighboring state government of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah support or inhibit the public health governance capacity of the Navajo Nation; (3) the implications of decisions made by neighboring counties and municipalities; and (4) “nongovernment” political action, community and grassroots organizing.

By broadening the analysis across scales and developing deeper understanding at each level, this collection of annotations will demonstrate the responsibility of the U.S. federal government for how COVID-19 is unfolding in the Navajo Nation. In what follows, I will identify specific strategies of the “politics of time” (Kirsch 2014) and the “lateness” of late industrialism (Fortun 2014) that inhere in the settler colonial “logic of elimination” of Indigenous peoples (Wolfe 2006), as enacted by the U.S. federal government, and indexed by compounding environmental health vulnerabilities. By shifting the ethnographic gaze from the long history of pathological studies of Diné people, and Indigenous peoples across the U.S., to the external forces compounding on the Navajo Nation, we will be able to see the dominant formation of energy geopolitics that is almost a century old. Power lines are the obvious indicators, as Andrew Needham points out, which are a seemingly banal infrastructure that connects the Navajo Nation to Phoenix, Arizona and other cities in the U.S. Southwest as they contour the uneven gradients of energy and political power, and trace the dualistic process of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2004). My central argument follows Dana Powell’s notion that, in the Navajo Nation, “energy is politics”—that is, “energy itself is at the heart of the Navajo Nation’s political existence,” and it is of broader cosmopolitical significance in Dinétah (Powell 2018:29; original emphasis).

What we will notice in the emergency public health response of the federal government, and the Trump administration in particular, is a double-vision for the Navajo Nation. As the pandemic rapidly unfolded, the environmental and public health of Diné people—what Powell refers to as “the true body politic”—was put at risk, rendered invisible, forgotten and ignored, or as Eryn Wise articulates, “treated as sacrifice zones for the pandemic,” echoing the discourse surrounding a legacy of “radioactive nation building” (Masco 2006). As Indigenous peoples and public health disappeared as a priority from the purview of the feds, the energy resources of the region simultaneously became a geopolitical target of intensive extraction. Reading between these two lines of forgetting Indigenous health and rendering energy resources legible for extraction offers unique insight into the governance style of the current administration; it also reveals the toxic infrastructures that shape pre-existing environmental health conditions (e.g., coal mines and power plants, abandoned uranium mines and mill tailings sites, and national “sacrifice zones” from Cold War nuclear weapons manufacturing and experimenting).

During the most urgent moments of the pandemic, the federal government was actively engaged in the promotion of resource extraction in the region, from uranium to oil and gas. The Navajo Nation is a place that temporarily disappeared from the purview of the federal government as a national health crisis, in a region that simultaneously became the focus of federal support for uranium mining. This cluster of annotations will highlight the double vision for the Navajo Nation that has emerged in the wake of the pandemic: The first step was the ignorance and refusal of the federal government to recognize and fulfill their responsibility to support Indigenous nations of the United States in a timely manner. In this case, timing was key.

This annotation responds to the question of migration of Covid-19 knowledge as social critique across borders. In this "quick response" post, originally published in early March, philosopher Frédéric Neyrat outlines different forms of separatism in response to the virus.

original French: https://www.terrestres.org/2020/03/05/virus-et-separation/

eng translation https://territories.substack.com/p/viruses-and-separation

Neyrat begins with an analysis of the French context beginning with President Macron's strategic decision to move from a logic of the commons to a logic of separatism in criticizing French-Muslim activists. Neyrat characterizes this as political separatism: separating the State from its people in order to protect the State. Macron's position co-incides with the emergence of a different form of separatism linked to the pandemic. Neyrat describes this as biopolitical separatism, the phenomena of governments asking individuals to separate themselves in order to protect themselves and prevent the spread of Covid-19. 

Neyrat then moves then to characterize the novel coronavirus as an expression of globalization and the anthropocene. Covid-19 emerges within strategies to erase separation by building global networks of trade. This analysis of quarantine or social-distancing within an overarching effort to build global infrastructure thereby overcome separation is the strength of the short piece.  In effect, individuals are asked to stay separated within inseparable conditions.

Neyrat concludes by trying to distinguish between different forms of separatism. What kinds of separations do "we" want to produce and what kinds of separations do "we" want to overcome—I am thinking here of Duygu Kasdogan discussion of the complexity of "freedom." What does scholarly freedom mean? How does it intersect with the protestors in the US who argue that social distancing policies are an infringment on personal freedom?

Neyrat raises the possibility of a "Great Refusal," (citing Marcuse, Blanchot) as an open signifier that may produce "a political virality that does not consent to the world order."  The text ends by suggesting that a re-imagining of separation, as a contestation of taken-for-granted conditions of the thermo-industrial capitalism, might be possible.

A radio interview with Neyrat (beginning ~29:26) for WFBH's Interchange is linked here