This map is a fascinating and important image as it does NOT show the many sites of (ongoing) nuclear radiation contamination in communities impacted by uranium extraction and processing. For example, the Navajo Nation has around 270 unreclaimed open pit tailings piles. This is not official "waste" but is quotidian waste that creates longstanding environmental harm.
Individualizing and psychologizing the suicides, ignoring the publicness of the action and the structural causes, took away from its extreme emotional potency. Although it did spawn a good deal of activism and research, the profit margins of Apple continue to grow and Foxconn’s are shrinking.
Automation is ignored - this topic was raised in the Dialectical Anthropology article that responded to something else that Ngai wrote and cited this piece.
Apple ”released its Supplier Responsibility Progress Report in February 2011 to show the remedial measures taken by Foxconn, its largest supplier, in the aftermath of the suicides. However, none of the ‘remedial measures’ addressed such core issues as speed-up, illegal levels of compulsory overtime work, dangerous conditions in the Foxconn factories, the humiliation of workers, and illegal practices associated with the use of student interns as workers.” -p1263
I think the corporations had extremely little regard for the Chinese factory workers, including the higher-ups at Foxconn and the people of Apple and the other companies that contract their manufacturing with Foxconn. It seemed like pure damage control.
Really just denying responsibility hard: Foxconn’s “public responses to workers’ suicides were uniform: the workers who attempted suicides suffered from individual psychological problems such as depression, distress over heavy debts, or family and other personal problems (Li, 2010). Foxconn hired Western and Chinese psychologists and psychiatrists to defend it in the wake of the plague of worker suicides at the company.” p1260
As more specified in news articles, like Heffernan 2013, Foxconn increased wages but increased the quotas by even more. They started making workers sign anti-suicide pledges that said they wouldn’t blame the company or sue or ask for compensation. They retracted that because of outcry but then just put up nets. “Steve Jobs gamely insisted that the factory, with swimming pools and cinemas, was far better than required. The Foxconn communications director Liu Kun, argued that with more than a million employees in China alone, the rate of "self-killing" wasn't far from China's relatively high average. Everyone pledged to do better and the story went away.”
In this economist article I can’t access, but that is cited in the Wikipedia article on this topic, they also mentioned that Buddhist monks were brought in for prayer sessions.
The activists “condemned the ineffectiveness of the Chinese government and trade unions to enforce labor law and protection of the migrant workers and hence urged Apple and other brands to support genuine reform of Foxconn’s unions.” p1261 - so they are turning to the brands for labor conditions to improve.
I used the analytic question to do a quick survey of open or civic data infrastructure in St. Louis. The city's open data portal features a database on their strategic land use program (SLUP), initiated in 2005, and an overview of sustainability initiatives in relation to land use.
I then looked further into current developments or articulations for civic data infrastructures based on this available data. A recent example is STL Vacancy, an initiative that is prototyping a map/database that displays information on vacant land in St. Louis. This news report (Walker 2018) provides figures on vacant lands in St. Louis, a background to the initiatives emergence and a first look at the prototype. According to the report, there are 20,187 vacant properties (half of them belonging to the city), which create a total of $17 million in yearly maintenance costs for the city. Further, the need to map and visualize these properties was picked up during the first "hackathon" in 2017 and carried forward by the OpenSTL group in a public-private partnership with other institutions. The article mentions that the map draws on a total of 12 data sources: “Seven data sets come from the city’s building division; two from the Land Reutilization Authority; and more from the assessor’s office on taxes and property values and the forestry department which maintains vacant land" (Walker 2018). The initiative's goal is to "provide tools to community stakeholders in order to work together more efficiently; to keep properties on the tax roll; reduce vacancy; and get properties back into productive use faster" (ibid). The article also links to an online guide that should "help local government officials, neighborhood associations, community-based nonprofits, residents, business owners, and other stakeholders better understand how to work together to use existing tools to address vacant property in the City of St. Louis."
This seems to be an interesting case for how civic/open infrastructure is currently imagined and developed. Interestingly, the discourse and arguments are driven by an economic incentive to make better use of the vacant lots, while questions of urban sustainability or our understand of anthropocenics seem to be less prominent.
The history of racialized exclusion to both social power and land tenure and homeownership has shaped how bodies are differentially impacted by land use in NOLA. This entire history could (and probably already is) a topic for a dissertation, but one case I found particularly interesting involved the Army Corps of Engineers' 2007 creation of an online database in which residents can find the "flood potential" faced by their homes (http://nolarisk.usace.army.mil/ --unfortunately no longer up). While this database was hailed as a landmark achievement in providing NOLA residents with their "right to know" about the risks in their neighborhoods, only a few remarked on what the data actually showed: that in the two years following the flood predominantly white neighborhoods had experienced 4-6 feet of flood reduction, black neighborhoods had experienced little to no flood reduction whatsoever.
This reminds me of a more general entanglement of racialized disparities, historical disinvestment and inequitable distribution of risk in America, which as Anna Clark so summarily puts it (in respect lead": "lead is one toxic legacy in America's cities. Another is segregation, redlining, and rebranding: this is the art and craft of exclusion. We built it into the bones of our cities as surely as we laid lead pipes."
Department of Interior agencies that manage federal lands (BLM, USFS, NPS) have educational programs for school students and visitors to public lands presenting relatively manicured histories of the places from both natural (biological, geological) and cultural history points of view. These forms of education do not necessarily encourage a reflective capacity for examining land use. In some instances, the multi-use aspect of these areas is treated as a taken-for-granted characteristic of the spaces while at other times multiple-use is somewhat obscured or omitted in favor of highlighting spaces as natural and carrying value in their own right as ecosystems/as places to visit specifically for the enjoyment of natural spaces.
In general there seems that the conflicts surrounding public lands themselves are rarely the focus or topic of educational programs. Furthermore, the historical and political conditions that contribute to such conflict or that create challenges for management, though recognized by some individuals within agencies, do not appear to be incorporated explicitly into educational programs.
Some questions that remain and require further ethnographic exploration are who else is educating people (education broadly conceived) about the areas that fall into the category of federal public lands? For instance, many local residents who are members of the LDS church hold negative attitudes toward the federal government but highly value these spaces and regularly camp, fish, hike, bike, and hunt on public lands. Who/what informs their knowledge and relation to these spaces? What education about these spaces and about the environment occurs through the LDS church?
With repeated instances of ignoring indigenous presence and claims to territory, the area now considered federal public lands in Utah is part of a large multi-state area that was Mexican territory until the 1848 Mexican Cession. Brigham Young and the group of LDS church members traveling with him to settle in the area arrived shortly before this land became part of the U.S. public domain. Whereas the Mormon immigrants to the area had originally sought to build a separate society from the mainstream U.S., church leaders ultimately pushed for statehood, viewing such legal status as potentially useful because state governemnt could provide a degree of autonomy. In early attempts to achieve statehood, the church set up an interim government--when that appeal for statehood was denied, that government somewhat continued despite not being formally/legally recognized by the U.S. Eventually in 1896, Utah was declared a state, shortly after a representative of the LDS church renounced the church's previous encouragement of plural marriage.
The state government that then formed and continues into the present is understood to be tightly entwined with the LDS church, with non-Mormon residents speaking cynically of the ways that their voices are ignored because they aren't LDS. Despites a strong sense of states' rights, 66.5% of land in Utah is federally-owned, thus federal agencies have a significant presence in the area. The overall high percentages of federally-owned land in the West (47% of western states) is a result of the geographic and climatic conditions that made many areas difficult to travel to and unsuitable for significant agricultural development, meaning many areas were not transferred out of federal hands through homestead policies or land grants. The areas remaining in federal ownership were, for many decades, used by ranchers rather freely until the formalization of bureaucratic procedures for permitting use of these spaces in the mid 20th century. While ownership has not shifted out of federal hands since mid-19th century acquisition, such changes as the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act and various changes to land status through legislative wilderness designation (as laied out by the 1964 Wilderness Act) and executive action (as enabled by the 1906 Antiquities Act) have resulted in changes to use and the permits required for such economic uses as cattle grazing in ways that are described as "federal land grabs," as a removal or taking away of land from locals and from the state.
The federal public lands under contention in southern Utah are adjacent to communities that hold significant anti-federal sentiment, in what appear to be two primary forms. One is a stance of anti-federal patriotism/nationalism, in which people view the federal government as tyrannical but cast the government as explicitly in opposition to the ideals of America. This perspective is seen in the militia movements that exist across western states and has been exhibited more publicly in instances such as the 2014 Bundy standoff in Nevada or the 2016 Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation. Another perspective present in communities near these federal lands is one of a refusal to recognize the federal governmant as a legitimate governing institution and the recognition of the church as the legitimate formation of government. This perpsective is primarily circumscribed to fundamentalist LDS communities, a number of which exist adjacent to federal public lands in southern Utah. In both of these perspectives there is a general disregard for the notion of the federal government as a legitimate owner of these lands and, by extension, as a legitimate manager and adjudicator of use.