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 her article, Scharenberg (2023) provides methodological reflections on politically engaged or militant social science research. In one section, she discusses the challenge that social movements act as knowledge producers in their own right, often working independent from or outside of academic institutions (2023, 15). This raises questions about what social scientiss add to the mix. I've had similar questions working with and alongside activists in the global anti-plastics movement. Building on Casa-Cortes, Osterweil, and Powell (2013), Scharenberg points out that one response for scholars is to act as "editors" or "curators" of collective knowledge. This argument resonates with the way that I and other collaborators have thought about the engaged ethnographic archive projects:

Activist ethnographers thus become editors of collective knowledges rather than the sole producers of scientific theory. Like a literary editor, the ethnographer works from a position, which does not create knowledges from scratch, but collects the perspectives of others and assembles them with reference to the given context. In this view, objectivity might be achieved, to borrow an expression from Haraway, by assembling “partial views and halting voices” into what she calls a “collective subject position” (1988: 590). Alternatively, we might think of the editor-ethnographer as Berger’s “clerk of the records” (Scheper-Hughes, 1995: 419) who compiles the history of a group of people. Scheper-Hughes understands this position as a kind of witness. (Scharenberg 2023, 16). 

During my thesis project, Tim has served as a collaborator and mentor while he studied data use among activists opposing Formosa Plastics Group (FPG). In addition to connecting me with activists and interview candidates, he also introduced me to a small network of American and Taiwanese students in Taiwan and the United States studying FPG. This community can share resources and knowledge to further our individual studies. Could this academic network serve as a parallel to the transnational activist alliances I am studying? Are the strengths and barriers of research alliances reminiscent of the strengths and barriers of activist alliances?