Analyze

Sylvia Wynter (2003) suggests that our current struggles in Western colonized society regarding racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, ethnicism, climate change, environmental destruction, and the unequal distribution of resources are rooted in what she argues is the overrepresentation of the descriptive statement of Man as human, which only recognizes white, wealthy, able-bodied, heterosexual men as "human." As such, just as I argue Black feminist writers and scholars have drawn on speculative methods and Afrofuturism, the use of twentieth-century technology and speculative imagination to address issues within Black and African diasporic communities (see Dery & Dery, 1994), to insist on and explore the full humanity of Black girls, women, and femmes, so too have Black and African diasporic scholars called on Afrofuturism to imagine new ways technology and traditional knowledge practices can address environmental injustice. Suékama (2018) argues that as a form of resistant knowledge building and theorizing, an Afrofuturist approach to environmentalism “integrates speculation with the ecological and scientific, and the spiritual or metaphysical'' to make our environmental justice less European, male, human, (and I would add capitalist) centered. Thus, an Afrofuturist approach to environmental injustice asks us to think about our collective struggle for environmental justice as a part of and connected to other forms of systemic oppression rooted in the rejection of African diasporic and Indigenous people and their knowledge practices through the overrepresentation of Man as human in Western society. In this way, a speculative and Afrofuturist approach to environmental injustice draws on African diasporic knowledge practices in conjunction with modern and traditional technologies to imagine new solutions to environmental injustice that center the needs, values, and traditional practices of African diasporic people.

Peterson-Salahuddin, Chelsea. 2023. "An Afrofuturist Approach to Unsettling Environmental injustice." 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 aim of this organization is to use medicine and science to record and focus on mass atrocities and human rights violations. The organization was founded on the idea that health care professionals possess skills that pose credibility to those who are persecuted sexually, morally, socially and economically. As health care professionals, they have the opportunity to hold people accountable for their actions. Examples of this include torture, sexual violence, civil unrest- it is their job to protect civilians' basic human rights.

Their membership consists of scientists, healthcare professionals and doctors. 

This organization has invesitgated ad exposed the use of chemical weapons on civilazations in Iraq, exhumed mass graves in Bosnia and Rwanda. They seaked to expose government torture and abuse of civial rights in many countries including-Columbia, Mexico, Peru, Sierra Leone and others. They approach disaster and emergency response through trying to stop them by exposing abuses to human rights. They investigate using human accounts and first hand experience. Through using their resources to expose injustice. They have won a noble peace prize for documenting landmine injuries and calling to ban them.

This group claims to have a new way of addressing emergency situations through using their process of stopping events that are already in progress through investigating the abuses, documenting evidence and stories and using their evidence as a call for action.

The events that motivated their ways of thinking about disaster and health was in 1981 a physician in Boston was called to go to Chilie to investigate the 'disapperance' of three physicians. Johnathan Fine entered the country and met the doctors who were psychologically terrorized. He heard their testimonies and recorded the,. It inspired him to go to Guatemala, Philipines and South Korea to educate about human rights globally. Dr Fine's visit caused the doctors to be released; he decided he wanted to help these people in situations about this full time. In 1986 Robert Laurence, Jean Mayer and Fine created Physicians for Human Rights.

The funding that enables their work to go and help others is through many methods of donation, they recieve grants and investments.

The data/reports they have collected to support their approach to help disaster include annual reports and newsletters that define the issues they are currently focusing on: what it includes, how one person can help. Their website also includes resources that describe the issue they are tackling their position and what is going on to prevent/cure the problem. Their website has experts, a university that specializes on 'empowering global communities' in order to be able to recoginze their lack of human rights. They also have a blog and first hand video accounts.

The research the organization has done in the past year is calling for the closure of Guantanomo Bay and ensuring that the US accepts Syrian refugees. They have taken first hand accounts of individuals in both circumstances. They provide annual reports for each year of the work they have accomplished these reports are extensive and explain what human rights were taken away and what PHR has done to help.

They rely on the internet, videos, blogs and first hand accounts in order to spread awareness.