Analyze

This text builds from earlier conceptions of the term “land dispossession” and “land grab”. As defined by the 2011 International Land Coalition, land grabbing specifically refers to large scale land acquisitions that are “ in violation of human rights, without prior consent of the preexisting land users, and with no consideration of social and environmental impacts”. Characterization of land grabs and their resulting harms most commonly considers the effect of physical displacement and harms within the articulated “grabbed” area (Nyantakyi-Frimpong, 2017;Ogwand, 2018;  huaserman, 2018). Li and Pan seek to expand the frame of analysis for land grabs beyond the site of grabbed land to consider the full extent of harms associated with land grabs both geographically (via pollution spillover to areas outside of “grabbed land”) and temporally (via latent “expulsion by pollution). 

 “While the villagers are not passive victims and have adopted various resistance strategies, the space for them to struggle and achieve success is confined and shaped by the existing power asymmetry in which local villagers, capital and local government are embedded.”  (Li and Pan, 2021, p 418). 

“...this framing of land dispossession is problematic in two aspects. Firstly, it obscures an invisible form of land dispossession in which people still maintain control of their land but its use value is damaged by pollution. This kind of indirect land dispossession could lead to expulsion, not due to the direct loss of control over land but by it being rendered useless by pollution.” Li and Pan, 2021, p 409). 

 This text employs a case study approach to characterize how villagers in a village in China have been displaced “in-place” as a result of new industrial activities within the area  (all specific details have been hidden within the publication, wherein the names of villager groups and the site of study itself is referenced only by coded letters). The scale of analysis primarily centers at the village level, though analysis of the case study itself extends towards the country level specifically when analysis of state actors are involved. 

Authors Hua Li and Lu Pan are scholars from China. Li is  affiliated with the College of Humanities and Law at Taiyuan University of Technology, wherein her research focuses specifically on water politics, environmental justice, and rural development and agrarian change. Pan is affiliated with the College of Humanities and Development at China Agricultural University. Her research interests include marginalized communities, rural development, and agrarian change.

Formosa Plastics publishes a quarterly newspaper called 親親報報 Qin Qin bao (engl. kiss kiss hug). A group of citizen journalists by the Taiwan Environmental Information Center and the initative FPCC Go Away have criticized the newspaper for different attempts of greenwashing (Wu 2015). The newspaper issues include arguments guaranteeing the safety of the 6th Napthha cracker's emissions, interrogrations of research about high PM 2.5 levels in the county and statements about supposed local population growth.

A 2012 blog entry by FPCC Go Away analysis the distribution and publication practices of the newspaper. Notably, the authors point out that an issue of the newspaper addressing PM 2.5 levels was re-published and distributed in the days leading up to a public speech by Prof. Zhan Chang-quan (Department of Public Health at National Taiwan University) who had studied air pollution in the county. 

The mission statement of the Center for Prisioner Health and Human Rights is as follows:

"The Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights seeks to improve the health and human rights of criminal justice populations through education, research, and advocacy."

The center's directors, members, and volunteers establish specific priorities on how this mission is going to be approached. Their current focuses as stated on their website are as follows:

– To bring attention to the health and healthcare issues and challenges of prisoners and other criminal justice populations.
– To improve the continuum of care for prisoners from admission to a correctional facility through release, including improving healthcare access and opportunities for criminal justice populations in the community.
– To advance policies and programs that promote both public health oriented approaches to mental illness, addiction, and substance use and [alternatives to][less reliance on] incarceration and the criminal justice system.
– To engage students and health professionals in the Center’s mission with training and education opportunities, and by providing students with practical experiences working directly on concrete issues, problems, and challenges.

In recent years, incarceration rates and prison populations nationwide have grown exponentially for a variety of sociological and political factors. The organization believes that research indicates that this epidemic has had a particularly hard impact on economically vulnerable communities, where a majority of the people brought into custody suffer from addiction, substance use, and/or mental illness. Due to their economic situation these people were likely unable to seek care or treatment from any public health system in the community. This interaction of illnesses and diseases and criminalization in communities and incarceration results in a complex public health and human rights crisis in both correctional and other criminal justice settings. The Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights seeks to apply new research to help to mitigate this.

The Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights is located at the Miriam Hospital of The Alpert Medical School of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

The program is funded in most part by Brown University, and research funding is suplimented by various grants applied for by individual researchers.

The program is focused on educating students and researchers in various methods to further research on the criminal justice system and its associated sociological factors. As of this time, the Center is offering two main educational opportunities, one for summer research interns and one for researchers to participate in a 2 year study on HIV in prisons funded by  the National Institute on Drug Abuse