Skip to main content

Analyze

Hawai'i

Misria

The ASTROMOVES project captures the career decision-making of astrophysicists and those in adjacent sciences, with particular attention to ‘intersectional’ identities, sex/gender diversity and visible/invisible disabilities. Qualitative interviews were recorded online (due to the Pandemic) and each scientist was assigned an Indigenous Hawaiian pseudonym. This was a subversive move to remind astrophysicists of the enormous debt they owe to the Hawaiian people for the use of their sacred mountain tops. All of the scientists consented to having a Hawaiian name. Seven scientists chose their own pseudonyms, most were Hawaiian place names: Maui, Waikiki, Waiheke, and Holualoa. Two Brazilians likewise chose Indigenous place names: Caramuru and Paraguaçu. The last name chosen was Kū'oko'a. Kū'oko'a is the Hawaiian concept of freedom, of which I was unaware. When questioned by editors, I had to evoke my Oahu birth as my right to use Hawaiian pseudonyms. For my visualizations, I chose to not use the Mercator projection which artificially enlarges Europe, instead I use the Peters projection or equal area map. Thus, Europe is de-emphasized by showing its area relative to the rest of the world. 

Holbrook, Jarita. 2023. "Visualizing Astrophysicists’ Careers." 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 Glass Plate

sgknowles

By Scott G. Knowles: As part of the STL Anthropocene Field Campus the research team visited the Wood Refinery Refinery History Museum on March 9, 2019. This museum is located on the grounds of the Wood River Refinery, a Shell Oil refinery built in 1917 and today owned by Phillips 66. The site is Roxana, Illinois, just upriver from Granite City, and just over two miles from the convergence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Sitting on the actual grounds of the refinery, the museum is an invitation to think across the micro, meso, and macro scales of the Quotidian Anthropocene, in terms of geography and also in terms of time. This refinery was built at the crux of the WWI, at a time when United States petrochemical production was entering an intensive phase of production, invention, corporate structuring, and global engagement. The museum is an invitation to think across temporal scales, backwards to the start of the refinery--through the individual lives of the workers and engineers whose lives defined the refinery--and forward to indeterminate points of future memory. This photo captures a key moment in an informal interview we did with one of the history guides. He had worked in the museum for decades before retiring. He explained to us that the museum sits in the former research facility of the refinery--and the glass plat he is showing reveals a beautiful artifact, a photograph made of the complex when it was built. Our guide only showed us this collection of slides after our conversation had advanced, perhaps after he was sure we were truly interested in his story, and the deeper history of the refinery. The pride in the place, the community of workers, and the teaching ability of the museum was manifest. The research team felt impressed, but also concerned about the health impacts (and naturally the environmental impacts as well) of the refinery. There was a mismatch in the scales--the memory of the individual tied to emotions of pride and knowledge of hard work done there--and the Anthropocene, global scale of petrochemicals. How do we resolve this mismatch? The glass plate is somehow a clue.

pece_annotation_1524700214

Dhruv.Patel

New York governor Andrew Cuomo ordered over 2000 National Guard troops were deployed to Long Island, New York City , and the hudson valley. Defense secretary Leon panetta had issued a prepare-to-deploy order in case the hurricane relief effort needed more support. Each service had to have 6,500 active duty troops ready in case they were called upon.