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.

In 2019, the National Assembly of the Republic of Korea passed a law identifying particle pollution (also called particulate matter, PM) as a “social disaster” (Framework Act on the Management of Disasters and Safety 2019). It was a response to nationwide attention to particle pollution from 2017, when apocalypse-like particle pollution occurred. It is not uncommon to characterize pollution as a disaster. Pollution is often described in damage-based narratives like disasters because environmental pollution becomes visible when a certain kind of damage occurs (Nixon 2011). PM is a mixture of extremely small particles and liquid droplets (EPA 2023). An established method for assessing the health risks associated with PM is the utilization of government or World Health Organization (WHO) air quality indices. These indices reflect the potential harm to human health based on PM concentrations. However, due to the limitations of the available monitoring data and the assumption of a certain normality according to the air quality index, its utility is diminished for bodies that fall outside this assumed range of normality. The existing practices and knowledge in pollution control had individualized pollution by presuming certain states of normalcy and excluding others. To challenge this, the anti-PM advocates in South Korea have defined, datafied, perceived, and adjusted the toxicity of particulate matter in various ways. They refer to the air quality index given by the WHO or the government, but they also set their own standards to match their needs and ways of life. They actively measure the air quality of their nearest environment and share, compare, and archive their own data online. The fact that the severity of air pollution is differently tolerated by individuals challenges the concept of the toxicity index that presupposes a certain normalcy. Describing pollution as a disaster contributes to environmental injustice by obscuring the underlying context and complexities of pollution. With the values of care, solidarity, and connectivity, capturing different perspectives of living with pollution and listening to stories from different bodies can generate alternative knowledge challenging environmental injustice. Drawing upon the stories of different bodies and lives with pollution, we can imagine other ways of thinking about the environment and pollution that do not externalize risks nor individualize responsibility. 

Kim, Seohyung. 2023. "Beyond the Index: Stories of Otherized Bodies Crafting Resistant Narratives against Environmental Injustice in South Korea." 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.

Operations of transnational companies are affecting marginalized communities across the globe. As Kaswan had highlighted through examples of Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in India, as well as pollution associated with oil companies in Latin America, the implications of distributive environmental justice in such contexts are apparent yet difficult to address. Across international boundaries law enforcement becomes increasingly difficult, which is at the heart of the problem of my research topic. 

“The “right” scale will depend upon the nature of the harm being analyzed and purpose for which information is being gathered.” (Kaswan, p 29)

“Numerous studies, at a multiplicity of scales, analyze the distribution of a wide variety of land uses, as well as risk: what exposures, with what consequences, do people experience?” (Kaswan, p 33). 

This text builds on concepts of equality, bases for deviating from the core idea of equality, and the multiple contexts that define and shape distributive justice. Kaswan additionally advances the distributive environmental justice by outlining the different contexts, including historical land use patterns, government regulations, infrastructure, and enforcement and the implications that each of these dimensions have on contributing to distributive injustice. 

The main narrative of this text builds on foundational ideas on equality and extrapolates it further to establish how distributive environmental justice, its ideas and articulations, as well as its operationalization, has taken shape throughout the years. To outline these points, Kaswan outlines different cases of environmental disaster, and subsequent government responses, to showcase how government institutions have both upheld and endeavored to address distributive environmental inequality in the past decades.