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Petro-Pedagogy & Science Capital

prerna_srigyan

"Far from being anti-science and anti-education, BP has successfully embedded itself at the heart of elite UK science and education policy and practice networks – in particular, networks focused on development and delivery of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. Rather than limiting itself to the narrow promotion of pro-petroleum rhetoric, BP has long seen its interests as being best served by the general promotion of pro-business practices and values throughout UK public education. Petro-pedagogy, in the case of BP at least, is best understood as a core component of a more extensive corporate education reform network that, for the past decade, has focused on promoting a neoliberal model of STEM education in schools" p. 475

"This brings us back to the argument of Eaton and Day (2019) that began this article: to tackle the crisis of climate change, we ‘need to dismantle the corporate power of the fossil fuel industries and their petro-pedagogy’ (15). Doing this, however, will require a far different model of STEM education: one that can help students ‘understand how manipulative politics, economic power and myth making PR are subverting public democratic will,’ and encourage ‘young people to apprentice as critical scientific policy analysts,’ and ‘create innovative counter-narratives to the old dysfunctional stories of intensifying carbon dependence’ (Elshof 2011, 15)." p.486

Nature is infrastructure

ghakim

Writing against the ecology/infrastructure divide. Nature becomes infrastructure "through work" - technopolitics & environmental politics become inextricably intertwined. Marxist framework, environment as being modified through human labor.

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maryclare.crochiere

"The purpose of this essay is to discuss a truly formidable task, the creation of an international nuclear emergency response team"

This quote sets up the rest of the article by showing the reader, regardless of their background or knowledge, that the creation of such a team is going to be difficult.  Beyond the standard challenge of creating a unified emergency response team, it is an international one - therefore with language barriers, geographical differences, and large distances to travel in the case of an emergency. And futhermore, it is a team created to deal with the incertainty of nuclear materials in an emergency situation - even more of a challenge.

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maryclare.crochiere

"In the interest of sustainable and socially legitimate solutions, arguably decisions to even the technical responses to disasters should not be left to scientists and engineers alone"

This statement is very thought-provoking and is not exactly expected in a research article - that a scientist's or engineer's decision should be influenced or editied by those without such specific education or expertise.

-balancing point between safety and profitability

-disaster did not happen as a chain of events that made it bound to occur at some point, it happened on a system that was in good shape

-over regulation of the industry and workers results in a lack of flexibility and therefore an inability to be creative in emergency situations

-need emergency response team to be skilled professionally and socially, but on a low budget - and very importantly - cooperation from nuclear corporations

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maryclare.crochiere

The author compares existing and previous nuclear regulation/safety/etc committees, analyzing differences between them and various shortcomings. This information is used to develop the author's idea of a more effective and safe oganization to enforce regulations and train an emergency response team.

The author also looked at how previous emergencies were handled and what new regulations stemmed from each, as well as how those have worked since their implementation, and what more can be done.