Analyze

TEST 3

tbrelage
In response to

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

TEST 2

tbrelage
In response to

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

TEST ANSWER

tbrelage
In response to

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

Empirical points

margauxf
Annotation of
In response to

“Under a 1986 federal law titled the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), hospitals are required to treat people who come to the ED presenting with an emergency medical condition, defined as a condition that, without treatment, will likely lead to serious impairment or death. … EMTALA is one of the largest federal mandates to provide services to have gone unfunded (Friedman 2011); costs instead fall on states and local health care systems.” 481

Quotes

margauxf
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“In bringing ethnographic attention to hot spotting as a technique of governance, we find that it provides lifesaving humanitarian interventions while operating within the racialized structures of violence that produce continual life crises. The institutional rationality of hotspotting and the encounters of care that it produces illustrate the often-contradictory role of medicine in the lives of poor people: both caring and coercive, it intertwines care and violence.” 475; “we conclude by suggesting that economic investment and return are becoming a reigning logic in the governance of poverty, generating hot spots as sites of interest for both policing and health care and decentering normative assessments of deviance, illness, and social problems” 476; “Neoliberal social assistance, as it is practiced in the health care safety net, is conceptualized as an “investment “in the population, as a strategic and targeted deployment of basic resources, one that promises to generate a return on investment for the state or health system in the form of cost savings.“ 485

 

Summary

margauxf
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 The authors examine the practice of “hot spotting,” a form of surveillance and intervention through which health care systems in the US intensively direct health and social services towards high-cost patients.  Health care hot spotting is seen as a way to improve population health while also reducing financial expenditures on healthcare for impoverished people. The authors argue that argue that ultimately hot spotting targets zones of racialized urban poverty—the same neighborhoods and individuals that have long been targeted by the police. These practices produce “a convergence of caring and punitive strategies of governance” (474). The boundaries between the spaces of healthcare and policing have shifted as a “financialized logic of governance has come to dominate both health and criminal justice” (474).

1619 Project

ramah
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This may not be the right place to post/share this, and I am happy to delete or move it! But I wanted to make a plug for the 1619 Project, and this post in particular, as helpfully complementing some of the other readings (such as McKittrick and Moore et al) on America's plantation history.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capital…

Hazardous waste work, race, and making disaster "professions"

ramah
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I began my research for these field notes by thinking about what kind of labor becomes available in the context of disaster relief/climate change? In my teaching this week, I have been talking about Cyclone Idai and mold as an example of one of how disasters unfold over different temporalities, as in Kim’s work, and via ‘aftershocks’ (Bonilla and Lebron 2019). Thinking about mold got me googling respiratory infections/respiratory health in New Orleans, which lead me to various sites that offer hazardous waste worker training programs (including under the auspices of environmental justice/community development work - e.g. http://www.dscej.org/our-work). This seems one example, among others, of how exposure to environmental harm is transformed into new sites of professionalization. This called to mind discussions of risky labor in the context of disaster, such as in Fortun 2001 or Petryna 2002, and to the centrality of respiration to thinking about anthropocenic processes (Kenner 2019). It highlighted how that transformation of geographical exposure into professional opportunity is then refracted via race and class; while some become hazardous waste clean up experts, others become climate change experts and professionals, who deploy expertise in the wake of other storms. Other accounts (https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2018/03/06/meet-the-refugees-fighting-for-the-future-of-new-orleans/) highlighted specific communities, such as refugee communities, as key sites of resistance to energy infrastructures including a new gas plant, which is being constructed in a FEMA-designated high-risk flood zone. This short stint of googling also lead me to a number of studies of respiratory health, many using spirometric readings to calculate the impact of exposure (for instance to remediation workers involved in cleaning after Hurricane Katrina) (eg. Rando et al 2012). Having recently read Lundy Braun’s book about race and spirometry (2014), these accounts highlighted for me how racialization is built into these processes in multiple ways: not only does race (along with class, professional background, geographical situation, etc) shape who is exposed and in what ways, it also shapes the how health and harm are measured and made visible in this context.Reference:Rando, Roy, John Lefante, Laurie Freyder, & Robert Jones. 2012. Journal of Environmental and Public Health. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jeph/2012/462478/

Where/whether to place human mobility in thinking anthropocenically

ramah
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Is there a place for thinking about the relationship between the governance of human mobility and anthropogenic processes in Louisiana? Reading the Andy Horowitz piece about Hurricane Harvey and the McKittrick piece about plantations got me thinking about the governance of human mobility as central to how New Orleans, and especially storms, are narrated. The ways in which mobility is made possible or impeded are central to ’storm narratives’. At the same time, recent news has highlighted how ICE activities have been concentrated in Mississippi, Louisiana, and other parts of the South. As the Southern Poverty Law Center notes, "The South is both a destination for new immigrants seeking security in the U.S. and a staging ground for deportation.” Louisiana - although perhaps not New Orleans - seems to be a key site in which these processes are visible. For instance, a report on NBC suggested that, “the number of detainees in facilities contracted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Louisiana and Mississippi surged from just over 2,000 at the end of 2017 to more than 8,000 as of July. That’s nearly four times as many as were detained in the two states in November 2017, the numbers show. Louisiana, with a population of more than 6,500, now has the largest population of ICE detainees of any single state apart from Texas.” One reason for this increase in numbers is financial. According to the SPLC, "The South, which already has some of the highest rates of incarceration in the country, is the bargain basement of immigration detention. Facilities charge among the lowest per diem rates in the country in order to land Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracts that can create jobs for communities, revenue for municipalities and profits for private prison operators, no matter the long-term cost. It’s an approach that flows from the South’s long history of looking to prisons filled mostly with people of color as a way to build local economies – a history that includes chain gangs and programs that “leased” prisoners to companies for work. Today, immigrant detention is but the latest chapter in that history” https://www.splcenter.org/20161121/shadow-prisons-immigrant-detention-south). Yet as this quote suggests, this mode of detention is also historical, and that history seems to play out in a number of ways. Facilities used to detain migrants have often also been used as prisons (including the La Salle detention center in Jena, Louisiana), for instance. But it seems that tensions around the notion of New Orleans as a "city of refuge” (Munyikwa 2019) are long-standing. Even as today, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports highlighted Cuban immigrants/asylum seekers, so too are tensions over racialized Caribbean migration longstanding. In the aftermath of the Haitian revolution, New Orleans was a kind of “flashpoint” (Kazanjian 2003) for tensions over migration and race as both French settlers from Haiti fled to Louisiana and as Afro-Creole refugees were expelled from Cuba. One report of the 1809 migration describes how “in Louisiana, as lawmakers moved to suppress manumission and undermine the free black presence, the refugees dealt a serious blow to their efforts.” http://www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/topic.cfm;jsessionid=f8302584551566978728483?migration=5&topic=3&bhcp=1 These are all clumsy linkages, and I’m not sure I want to draw historical analogies across contexts about which I have only cursory knowledge, but it seems to me that there are linkages or repetitions of connections between labor, environment, and human mobility that for me provoke questions about the relationship between anthropocenics and regimes of human mobility and carcerality (beyond just the notion of ‘climate refugees’). Resources consulted: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/ice-detainments-surge-mississippi-louisiana-alarming-immigration-advocates-n1042696 Southern Poverty Law Center & National Lawyers’ Guildhttps://www.splcenter.org/20161121/shadow-prisons-immigrant-detention-southhttps://www.splcenter.org/news/2019/04/10/cuban-men-thrown-louisiana-prisons-despite-legal-asylum-requests http://www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/topic.cfm;jsessionid=f8302584551566978728483?migration=5&topic=3&bhcp=1 https://www.theadvocate.com/gambit/new_orleans/news/the_latest/article_8687dfba-a127-5bb9-9635-25502c2916dc.html https://nolapsc.org/human-rights/ Munyikwa, Michelle. 2019. ‘Up from the dirt’: Racializing Refuge, Rupture, and Repair in Philadelphia. Dissertation submitted to the Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania. 

Kristin Gupta: Ecological Grief and Awareness of Mortality in NOLA

kgupta
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It has become a common refrain to ask how the Anthropocene is experienced locally, but what about corporeally? A growing body of evidence (such as this report from the APA) demonstrates that climate change and its effects are linked to elevated rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, PTSD, and a host of emotions including anger, hopelessness, and despair. After Hurricane Katrina, it was estimated that 1 in 6 survivors experienced PTSD, and Harvard researchers found that suicidal ideation heavily spiked. While discussions of these forms of ecological grief (or "ecoanxiety" by psychologists) have largely focused on mental health, economic impacts, and big storms rather than less spectacular forms of ecological change (especially in New Orleans), I am particularly interested in finding how embodied apprehensions of human vulnerability are experienced within the city, and how these have affected approaches to mortality and practices around death and dying.

Aside from talking to more deathcare professionals in the area (something I hope to do once we arrive), I have found rather robust evidence that there is increased engagement with mortality in New Orleans. Death Cafes, which are community gatherings to discuss death and combat taboos that make it an inappropriate topic of conversation, have regularly met for the past two years. Furthermore, preliminary research on funeral homes in NOLA seems to indicate increased interest in green internment options, with multiple organizations framing green/natural burial as a gentle option that "returns the body to nature." While means of casket burial and cremation have historically worked to “correctly” order death and the dead through preservation or means of obliterating the body as quickly as possible (organizing principles that have that rendered death as an interruption rather than a natural process), these endeavors seem to accept to the pressing realities of individual and earthly mortality by framing death as an opportunity for renewal - a sort of "circle of life." 

Although it is less related to my own area of expertise, one of most surprising discoveries I made was that New Orleans was home to the original "Before I Die" wall. In 2013, artist Connie Chung created a participatory chalkboard in an abandoned house with a fill-in-the-blank question of “Before I die, I want to ______.” (The next day, the wall was completely filled with responses.) Iterations of this project are now in over 75 countries. While Chung does not specifically cite anthropogenics as a source of interest or inspiration, its original placement on a building that stood as a sort of monument to ecological devastation makes me strongly think that there are broader connections to be made here about somatic attunements to climate change.