Analyze

“The large question this study addresses is the following: How do people make sense of (and cope with) toxic danger? The Martinezes’ story anticipates the complexity of the answer(s): physical and psychological suffering is compounded by doubts, disagreements, suspicions, fears, and endless waiting.” (4)

‘Flammable is a story of people’s confusion, mistakes and/or blindness regarding the toxicity that surrounds them. Flammable is also a story of silent habituation to contamination and of almost complete absence of mass protest against toxic onslaught’ (4)

“Schoolteachers, journalists, and lawyers are also part and parcel of daily life in Flammable. Together, all these actors contribute to what Flammable residents know about their place. They also influence what they ignore, what they want to know, and what they misrecognize. Government officials, company personnel, physicians, teachers, journalists, and lawyers jointly (but hardly cooperatively, given that their opinions don’t count equally) shape locals’ experiences of contamination and risk. This book examines how and why this production of shared knowledge (or lack thereof ) occurs.” (5)

“All in all, confusions, bewilderments, divisions, rumors, frustrations, and hopes are making Flammable residents wait—they wait for more testing, for further and better knowledge, for relocation, and for the “huge” settlement with one of the “powerful companies” that will, in the words of a neighbor, “allow us to move out.” This waiting is, as we will show, one of the ways in which Flammable residents experience submission.” (6) 

“We did our best to learn how to listen, look, and touch with respect and care, knowing with Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992:28) that “seeing, listening, touching, recording, can be, if done with care and sensitivity, acts of fraternity and sisterhood, acts of solidarity. Above all, they are the work of recognition. Not to look, not to touch, not to record, can be the hostile act, the act of indifference and of turning away.” (14)

‘… the culture of toxic uncertainty is a complex web of meanings and shared understandings’ (108)

Labor of confusion: “During the long period of slowly germinating contamination, the actions of government authorities toward pollution in the neighborhood were less consistent and more contradictory than either the denial or underestimation that has been documented in the existing literature. Those multiple incongruous actions gave shape to what we term, extending the insights of students of ideology and symbolic power (Thompson 1984; Eagleton 1991; Bourdieu 1991), a labor of confusion that has a decisive effect on shared (mis)understandings.” (10)

 Ulrich Beck, social invisibility, lack of “social thinking” about environmental issues (Beck 1992)

Bourdieu, symbolic violence - misrecognition of power structures on part of the oppressed enables domination

Toxic uncertainty: “a way of experiencing toxic suffering that is shaped by what we call, borrowing from Charles Tilly (1996), the interacting “invisible elbows” of external power forces and of everyday routine survival struggles” (6)

Flammable is an account of how people in a particular place make sense of slow, invisible environmental pollution. The people of Flammable live in an Argentinean shantytown located next to petrochemical companies and storage facilities. They have been deeply affected by the rise in unemployment in the 1990s, with most residents subsisting on part-time manual jobs at one of the companies, retirement pensions, state welfare programmes and what else they can find. The area in which these residents live is known and recognized by government experts to be contaminated and unsafe for human habitation–and yet widespread confusion and uncertainty amongst residents and a lack of government actions means that the shantytown continues to exist. Auyero and Swistun explore the multitude of influences that ‘‘shape what people see, what they don’t see, what they know, what they don’t know, and what they would like to know, what they do and what they don’t do’’ (145). They show how residents gradually naturalize their situations, which, combined with the mystification of dominant discourses, contributes to their quiescence in the face of contamination. 

This 7-minute 'image film' was produced in light of the 100 year anniversary of the Wood River refinery. It briefly touches on the company's products, history and guiding values. I first saw the film in a small cinema room at the Wood River Refinery Museum and found this upload on YouTube. I was curious to see how anthropocenic effects are or are not depicted.  At about 90 seconds into the clip, a plant operator states: "This piece of land, this refinery has been here for a hundred years and it has changed with the world over the last hundred years, through world war two, but now we have women in the refinery." However, the narrative is not further developed, as the film cuts to another worker who recounts visiting the facility with his father. Certainly, a promotional film like this is supposed to present the company in the best light possible. When it comes to social and environmental change, a vague acknowledgment of World War II and a positive framing of women entering the company's workforce might indicate the limits of this visual mode of communication. 

Ebola Response Anthropology Platform is anthropologists from all over the world to providing advice by email, calls and web-based dialogues by those working for NGOs, government and international agencies. The platform help to engage with socio-cultural and political dimensions of the Ebola outbreak and build locally-appropriate interventions. There are some resistances of local culture and external health system to control the Ebola outbreak. 

Individual who care about the Ebola, organisations, and government might use the website platform. It could be doctors, academic, emergency staff, governmental agents and so on. 

The Ebola Response Anthropology Platform is funded by a grant which is from Research for Health in Humanitarian Crises (R2HC) Programme. It is overseeing, executed and managed by the Wellcome Trust and DFIF. As well as the platform is collaborate with other Ebola response anthropology initiatives, within Emergency Ebola Anthropology Network and francophone SHS Ebola Network. 

The platform offer many functions to audiences. The platform offer different ways to help organisations to solve propblem, such as email, calling and website-based dialogues. They will give suggestions by following the actual case. This website platform offer a space for people to put more news and opnions for helping Ebola outbreak. There are lots of case and papers can be read on website, comments and opinion can be posted, and also ask a rapid response question. There are also six sub-heading are sorted as Identifying and Diagnosing Cases, Management of the Dead, Caring for Sick, Clinical Trials/Research, Preparedness and Communication and Engagement. There are also tag on each resources to help reading. On the left side, there are five symbols can easily link to Facebook, Twitter, Printing, email or share in other ways. In addition, there is a column on the right side showing the latest resource, opinion and news. 

The platform is designed with several areas and different elements to offer audience a good visualized. It is within text, photos and symbols. Text are applied different fonts, colours, and size, which created a visualized information to audience. 

User can see six areas included Briefings and Guides, Background and Field Notes. When click into one of these sub-headings, you can see there are some case or news. Each title is obviously and the beginning of the papers, and user can see more information about it when click ‘Continue reading’. There are also tag under each case, and folders that the case sorted into. When click into the paper for more information, user also can download it as PDF. Besides, user can leave their information and comments under the reading.  In addition, there are also latest, opinion, news and tag could be read on the right side area.