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.

What data platforms are windows into data culture and politics in this setting?

What could one learn about Baltimore through a close analysis of the "Boston Tree Inventory" or through close work with CalEnviroScreen (noticing what gets pulled into visibility and what remains off-screen)? 

What kind of data infrastructures are imagined as needed n this setting and for what historical and contemporary reasons? In Austin, for example, energy transition actors have worked to establish energy data infrastructure that is separate from established data infrastructures supported by power companies, etc. 

What ideals are data collected to protect or to contest?

The author of this article is Scott Gabriel Knowles, the department head and an associate professor in the Drexel University Department of History Center for Science, Technology and Society. His focuses are on risk and disaster, with particular interests in modern cities, technology, and public policy. He also serves as a faculty research fellow of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware and since 2011 he has been a member of the Fukushima Forum collaborative research community. His more recent works include:

The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).4

Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City (Editor, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

"Defending Philadelphia: A Historical Case Study of Civil Defense in the Early Cold War" Public Works Management & Policy, (Vol. 11, No. 3, 2007): 217-232.

This article examines how disaster investigations in the United States have evolved over time, from the burining of the capitol building near the birth of the republic through the theater fires and boiler explosions of industrialization to the collapse of the world trade centers at the present, showing how the modern, bureaucratic system of disaster investigation was built. 

This arguement is supported by looking at 4 specific case histories and examining the factors contributing to the investigations in each.

1. The 1814 Burning of the Capitol Building - Investigation of the disaster conducted by one engineer, B.H. Lathobe, who was given vast resources with very few obsticles, except for financial constraits and an impatient congress, to complete his investigation and reconstruct the building. 

2. 1850 Hauge St. Explosion - After a major boiler explosion in Manhattan's Lower East Side, a pannel of "jurrors" and "experts" were called together to complete investigations, bring forth the history of the fauty boiler, and place the blame for the accident in an effort to "memorialize the dead and bring them justice." Because of the way this investigation was conducted, the blame could not be accurately placed so everyone involved was blamed for the failure.

3. 1903 Iroquois Theater Fire - John Ripley Freeman, a fireproof engineering expert and factory inspector, was brought in to complete a report and provided one of the first "modern" scientific disaster investigations. He utilized a new network of investigators, engineers, insurance companies, testing labs, and inter-industry coordination that characterizes modern disaster investigation. 

1. "Clashes over authority among powerful institutions both public and private, comptetition among rival experts for influence, inquiry into a disaster elevated to the status of a memorial for the dead: these are the base elements of the World Trade Center investigation. And yet, even a brief historical review shows us that these elements are not unique."

2. "In this article, I will show that conflicts over authority, expertise, memory, and finally the attribution of responsibility suffuse the history of disaster in the United States."

3. "Blame, memorial, and reconstruction tend to outpace technical consensus."

Detailed research into historical cases was done to produce the claims and arguements presented in this article. No new investigation was conducted to obtain support for the arguement, and the historical cases were used to draw ties with the ongoing investigations taking place at the World Trade Center site.

Emergency response is not specifically mentioned in this article, as the focus of the article is investigation in the aftermath of disaster. In some cases, such as the Iroquois Theater Fire and the World Trade Center, investigations found that had more adequite emergency fire response been available at the time of the accident the outcome of the disaster could have been much different.

This article has been referenced in various other articles in the DSTS field, including Engineering Risk and Disaster: Disaster-STS and the American History of Technology (S. Knowles) and The World Trade Center Analyses: Case Study of Ethics, Public Policy and the Engineering Profession (WH Coste).