Analyze

Favelas in RJ state are often located on hills, which served as refuge for enslaved people - after the abolition of slavery (1888) - and immigrants, who worked for downtown citizens. The Law of lands (1850) prevented unoccupied lands to be owned through labour and provided government subsidies for the arrival of foreign settlers to be hired in the country, further devaluing the work of black men and women. As a result, favelas today are mostly composed of a black population, surviving decades of persecutions and low incomes while defending, preserving and creating a unique culture rooted in African origins that reverberates into music and the arts. Children in favelas, due to social and economical inequality and racial discrimination, have less possibility of personal development and professional realization. They attend public schools where in 2021, according to SAEB, students do not reach a satisfactory level in Portuguese language (69%) and math (95%).

They hardly have access to after-school courses and do not tend to see themselves represented in the academic community. This produces a disadvantage in access to higher education and consequently in opportunities for decent employment. The project Closer to the Sky aims at co-producing scientific knowledge in collaboration between astronomers and artists/educators living in the favela of Cantagalo Pavão Pavdosinho (PPG, RJ, Brazil), for children, teenagers and young adults of the community. We will work in close collaboration with the social project Ninho das Aguias, where classes and night sky observations will be held.
Offering extracurricular courses and cultural experiences to students in the PPG, we wish to enrich their school curriculum and strengthen the chance they wish to stay in education after secondary school. A key element of the courses is providing positive role models of scientists from Afrodescendant backgrounds, reinforced by the presence of local artists and educators, thus endorsing their role within the academic community. The project also creates just work opportunities for local artists and educators, who will offer workshops rooted in favela culture, while at the same time creating novel, decolonial courseware based on contextualized science, i.e materials that use the context of marginalized societies as examples where we can understand, learn and make science. The material developed within the project will be shared as Open Educational Resources in several languages.

Barbosa Araujo, Claudio Alberto. 2023. "Closer to the Sky." 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, Hawaii, Nov 8-11.

I published this news article about a hunger strike against Formosa Plastics that occurred in Texas this fall. Despite the extremity of a 30-day hunger strike, the protesting tactic has not gained attention from national media outlets. At the time I published this article, two small environmental organizations had announced the beginning of the strike, but none continued to cover the event in the unfolding weeks. While activists are driven to take on dangerous protest tactics, little communication of these tactics has carried across mass media.

The article itself introduces Formosa Plastics through its reputation as a "serial offender" of environmental and workplace safety regulations. I list several statistics on legal fines that Formosa Plastics has accumulated overtime, using these quantities to demonstrate the scale of their harm to environmental and human health. An important limitation of this storytelling strategy, however, is that many of Formosa Plastics' actions go undocumented, and even when documented, do not lead to legal consequences. Furthermore, we should still strive to acknowledge the harms committed by Formosa Plastics that are technically within legal limits.

This film follows the story of USMC Master Sgt. Jerry Ensminger. After the death of his 9 year old daughter to lukemia, he searched for the cause of his daughters illness, and his persuit led him to discover a Marine Corps cover-up of one of the largest water contamination incidents in U.S. history at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune. The film follows Jerry's investigation and persuit to make the truth known to the public and to force the Marine Corps to be "always faithful" to the thousands of Marines and their families exposed to toxic chemicals at the camp, and at other military bases across the country where similar occurances took place.

The narrative is made and sustained by establishing Jerry's back story, then following his investigation and persuit of the truth which lead all the way up to a congressional hearing. Information on the chemicals found in the water and the effects on humans is presented in the film, and it does have an emotional impact at these diseased effect children and destroy families and lives.

There are 2 major groups of stakeholders described in the film, the Marine Corps and the people effected by diseased linked to the marine corps camps. The marine corps needed to grapple with the problems of waste disposal and the aftermath of how to deal with the effected people, while the people effected needed to survive the diseases, rebuild their lives, and persue justice from the military.

Emergency responders are not portrayed in this film

I found the parts of the film regarding the initial investigation and the release fo marine corps documents on the internet to be most compelling, because this was the establishment of the proof that the corps knew fully about the potential health concerns at Camp Lejeune and actively covered it up and did nothing to improve the conditions until it was too late.

This film would best address an audiance of young to middle aged adults, possibly with military ties such as being a veteran. These people would have an interest in the acountability of the goverment and its various agencies and branches.

The viewpoints of elected goverment officials on the state and federal levels are lacking from this film.

To enhance it's eduacational value, more of the scientific links between the chemicals and environmental hazards present at camp lejeune could have been explored and not just stated as a fact.