Schools and colleges have stepped up to provide skilled manufacturing training
Fresno County offers employee training through the New Employment Opportunity program, which reimburses companies that hire through the program
Economic leaders/local government: bringing in diverse occupations and companies to the valley, including a medical complex in Clovis, which will house the first medical school in the valley
Industry: not enough highly skilled workers
Schools: not enough students going into high-paying jobs
Increasing jobs in Central Valley from large corporate warehouses, but those don't always come with high wages, can be dangerous
45% of Fresno Unified School District students take part in career and technical programs - better graduation rate, offers students work experience and skills
In their introduction, Vermeylen's argument for a particularist and decolonial approach to justice through a recognition of plural ontologies and epistemologies that decenters Western liberal discourse and its theory of justice. How does bringing the lens of coloniality into environmental justice literature alter our visions of energy futures? Can we make appeals to environmental justice without recourse to liberal theories of individual rights and property ownership? More specifically, I am wondering how our team can study and address this dynamic plurality of ways of understanding and experiencing in/justice in this site, and how can we engage this plurality in productive ways? What axes of difference and inequality should we be looking for/at (race, gender, class, sexual orientation, citizenship, housing status, etc)? If the Anthropocene is coloniality by another name, how can we foreground this in our approach?
Environmental justice narratives in the U.S. often fall into "sacrifice zone" narratives that universalize experiences on the community-level, reproducing specifically bounded narratives about American lives and livelihoods, relationships to nature and capital, and the kinds of knowledge and authority that matter. Vermeylen's article disrupts this idea, rightfully arguing that environmental justice requires a more upfront confrontation with the socio-historical causes of oppression brought about by coloniality, as well as the fact that we need to question the righteousness of EJ discourses that rely on white settler logics.
For the Austin Field Campus, how can we bring attention to Anglo-American settler colonialism in our approaches to EJ and gentrification? And thinking back to the NOLA Field Campus, what Texas histories should we be drawing from to understand energy transitions in the city?
The system was built to serve organizations and individuals with humanitarian goals. The system gathers data from report, reviews, and users and compiles it into comprehensible information to help inform decision-making for humanitarian concerns. Portions of the app also focus on education and technical support for field researchers looking to collect large quantities of data.
The system is primarily used by researchers, scholars, and organizations with humanitarian interests. The app also has functions which would attract users that are beginning research and do not have established connections within the field as the app provides a support system.
The development of Twine was funded primarily through donations from individual investors interested in the data sharing aspects of the software and humanitarian aid organizations who benefit from the accessible data.
Twine provides information and software to set up compatible data collection systems that pool information into the larger system, which the app then makes available to its users. The system also includes a publishing and collaboration aspect which allows groups of people from all over the globe to access the same data and report on the findings together.