Analyze

one more minute

This text argues that the umbrella term citizen science has come to describe a variety of organizations and structures that function in a very different way. Not only does the notion of citizen science cover a wide variety of situations, but the term itself makes references to different types of organizations and is not neutral. Japan had forms of "citizen science" which pre-existed the introduction of the English term, as heirs to the development of more engaged scientific practices by politically inclined scientists in the 1970s.

The tensions within the use of the term citizen science and its diverse embodiments take the form of the following: basically, the concept of citizen science in Japan is mostly used in the context of top-down participatory approaches. The organizations that emerged after the Fukushima disaster are much more varied than this and exist within a framework that had been previously developed in Japan. This framework included visions of participatory and democratic science making by citizens, for citizens, and of citizens. They are mostly local organizations that are sometimes but not always affiliated to a network. Some of them cooperate with more formal institutions, while others steer clear of any collaboration with formal science or governments, partly because there is a lot of distrust towards these institutions in Japan, especially since the Fukushima accident.

One of the pitfalls of the reputation that citizen science projects have in Japan is that they are associated with the anti-nuclear movement and are therefore associated with the far left. This causes a need for distantiation from any political association, which some of the organizations studied use.

One of the reasons for the specific nature of data and knowledge management in this context is the economic necessity and attractiveness of stable, high paying employment. In terms of the beginning of the accumulation of local knowledge regarding the risks to which the workers and the neighbors were being exposed to, this clearly played a role. For fear of losing their good paying jobs, and due to the military nature of their occupation, workers never told anything about their jobs to their families, or didn't ask questions that could have led to uncomfortable answers. This dynamic continued later, as we can see by the testimony of the worker who worked on the clean-up of the Weldon Springs site. The Priest also notes that in the neighborhood, people were wary of information leaking, as it might depreciate their property values.

Something else which we can observe is that, on top of the economic necessity for preserving one's job, there is also a sentiment of pride in doing one's work properly. A worker recalls that the relationship that the workers had to having to wear blue (and reduce your actions because you were contaminated) was that it was just part the job, and that they had a job to do. After the Weldon springs plant closed, there was a liberation of voices, and it was easier to report health concerns. The sentiment of pride in doing ones work properly is completed by a sentiment of patriotism. The same worker, Mr Schneider, said: "We have to believe what our government tells us, what the heck, uh. Best country in the world, I still think it is." Another example of the relationship between the job and the risk is the testimony of the clean-up worker who said that they shut of their Geiger counters, because they were "just going nuts". Here we can see that when the risk is too high, it becomes less visible, less understandable, because it is inescapable. Another reason for the difficulty of accumulating and sharing information, at least until the 1990s, is the priority of beating the communists. The discourse of emergency and national priority is not conducive to asking questions (as we can observe today in different ways).

The closing of the Weldon Springs plant coincided with the rise of environmental concerns in the USA and the change in environmental perspective had an impact on the categorization of places such as the Weldon Springs one, which became a Superfund site. This required a change in management at the department of energy because they started needing to have conversations and interactions with the public. This did not solve all the knowledge management problems however, because the measures put in place to deal with the injustices were insufficient compared to the nature of the events that had unfolded.

This is for multiple reasons. The first the nature of the risk means that the production of knowledge and regulations was complicated by a lack of understanding of the different medical pathways, conditions, and interactions which lead to the development of health problems. The number of people affected is also quite small, so the statistics may not appear to be significant. The second is the complexity of the accumulation of data in order to gain reparation and recognition, something which led to a movement to make the process more collective, in order to support the data finding and management process and make the knowledge of the administrative procedures consolidated. Finally, there were instances where the records of employee exposure were falsified, which meant that the access to this information was impossible.

One question that is brought up in the documentary which compelled me is the quesiton of knowing how to mark the borders of acceptable risk. While at the beginning of the nuclear production operations, the question is not raised so much, it comes into play later, when the environmental movements have influenced the governance of the USA enough that the clean-up becomes a question answerable through policy. It is at that point that multiple tensions arise. First, there is the tension between the perception of risk that the workers who worked in the factories had and the outwards sign of protection that the workers doing the clean up wear. And second, once risk is acknowledged, a tension arises related to the extent of risk, and the areas which need to be protected.  As the priest recalls,  people visiting the clean-up site, were in laymen's clothing on one side of the fence, and on the other side of the fence, people were in moon suits. Similarly, a clean-up worker recalls that the houses where they stayed during their time at work were just on the other side of the fence from the clean up site where they had to wear protective gear.

Another tension which intrigued me in this documentary is between the representation of exposed workers as heroes and as victims. This is something which arises of another context which is mentioned in this documentary which is the military, and some of the exposed workers are veterans. Faced with life altering situations, it is without a doubt useful to have a construction which permits the making of meaning and the perception of oneself as honorable, but it should be investigated what the impact of patriotism and loyalty to country is on perception of risk and injustice. 

The last question which intrigued me in this documentary is that of the construction of the deterrent/protective structure on the nuclear waste site. The priest raises an interesting point when he asks whether the best use of the money spent was in constructing this structure that would, according to him, be attractive to children, instead of providing financial support and health care to the people affected by the radiation. It really made me question the value of creating an attractive memorial like structure, and the discourse it conveys on the nature of the events which unfolded there. And of course, the classic question of the management of essential message bearing structures that wil long outlive us.

The original labor of this quotidian Anthropocene is the labor of weapon production. The economy of war produced a situation where workers' security or the environment was absolutely not the main priority. As someone said in the documentary, there was no reason for workers not to be protected as early as 1942. After the war, work had to be put in to construct more permanent buildings which would improve worker safety and allow better control of the uranium purification process. Another form of labor was put in to structure the practices of control of worker's contamination.

Another labor, which was provoked by the anthropocenics in this situation is that of the medical professionals who surrounded and treated the workers. For example, Mr Schneider's first cancer was discovered by his chiropractor.

Another provoked labor is the activist labor of the workers, children and activist who are impacted by the health risks of working in those factories. The paperwork and administrative labor required to obtain compensation for health impacts is very high, and requires expert help, organizing in a collective was another labor which permitted the previous ones, and allowed for the pooling of ressources and knowledge to properly defend the rights of workers. A labor which is related to this one is the labor of workers' unions to fight for accurate representation of the risks entailed by the employment of their members and to support the protection of workers.

Related to the labor within the factories themselves is the labor of clean-ups, which contained some of the same risks, with more protection and less exposure time than the original problem producing labor. There is also the labor of knowledge production and risk assessment by individual workers who were coerced in putting their livelihoods above their health. One worker says he had severe nosebleeds on the job and was warned/threatened by his supervisor that he would be fired if he told someone about it.

The final labor that I noticed being covered in this documentary is the labor of everyday clean up. Some people recall cleaning radioactive dust off of their laundry that they set to dry outside, and someone else recalls her brother cleaning the dust off his car in the morning.

We're still doing this Galileo schtick? Absolutely the worst model for the science-authority relationship, but scientists (well, at least physical scientists) still love it.  More to come...

First: Another list on another google doc and just looking at it https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1UTQvW_OytC37IatMNR5qJK7qKfSylNpI2fT3pdteVZA/mobilebasic gets me started: we're all barely keeping up and just trying to direct the firehose into some readily available container like a google doc because we can't drink any more and it's the easiest thing to hand.  I'm happy with the dangerous "we": all we humanists and all them scientists are trying to do kaelidoscopics at speed, saving the excess for future analysis while trying to do the analysis right now and get something in print right now which is aleready too late.  "They" have better containers (infrastructure) and that matters, but I think it's important to note the shared space of urgency and excess and ask about the effects these have on analysis, ours and theirs and: ours.

It has to be hurried, the only take worth anything these days is the hot take, for scientists, science journalists, science analysts. An exaggeration, but I'm rushed. We know that air pollution (two words harboring such complexity and excess on its own: PM2.5, ozone, NOX, etc.etc.) impacts health in numerous ways, in and beyond our repiratory system; we know that those physiological logics are compounded by cultural logics, in their complexity and excess: race poverty geolocation healthcare access nutritional needs etc. etc. A kaleidoscopic intersectional analysis that, to get good reliable outcomes, takes time.

A need for generosity.

So as I make my way down the list in the google doc and read that some group or some lab shows the COVID-19 intersects with air pollution and makes for worse outcomes for African Americans I'm predisposed toward belief, for many good reasons, compounded by the rush. And the data and the correlations between, say, increased mortality in areas of northern Italy where there are higher levels of airpollution is certainly believable, compelling -- for NO2 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720321215?via%3Dihub

and air pollution generally

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749120320601

That kind of crunching of large data sets seems believable -- and has been stamped as peer reviewed. So what do we do with this article in The Conversation

https://theconversation.com/air-pollution-covid-19-and-death-the-perils-of-bypassing-peer-review-136376

critical of a Harvard School of Public Health study available as a preprint on medrxiv --

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.05.20054502v2

-- that concludes that "an increase of only 1 μg/m3 in PM2.5 is associated with an 8% increase in the COVID-19 death rate (95% confidence interval [CI]: 2%, 15%)"?  The Canadian researchers in The Conversation are not convinced:

"It is almost impossible to try to adjust for the influence of all these factors, as this study tried to do, because the interactions between these variable are so complex. Accounting for these factors could only be done in studies using information from individual-level information."

"Proper peer review must not be bypassed — and the onus for respecting its role falls not just on journalists but also on scientists to communicate the correct information accurately."

I'm suspicious -- and if I had more time I would be more suspicious of my suspicions -- for two reasons: one, a lot of those studies on the google docs list are preprints.  But more importantly, the call for "individual-level information."  What does this mean? I don;t think anyone is working with "individual level information" in all of these studies, so why does this one become a target?

1. Because it's Harvard PH, of Six Cities study fame, first linking air pollution to increased mortality and the key reference point for US air pollution regulation. There's a long history of the oil industry and their scientists just trying to pick holes and cast doubt on these studies out of Harvard.

2. The criticism smacks of the most recent devious strategy of the air regulation opponents, which is to call for individiual level data in epidemiological to be released in the name of "transparency." Which can't be done.

So who are these Canadian guys and are they up to something more than "just raising questions and being good scientific skeptics"?

UPDATE 1 HOUR LATER:

So I looked them up: Mark Goldberg was a member of the Reanalysis Team of the Health Effects Institute that validated the Six Cities Study: 

https://theasthmafiles.org/content/hei-validation-six-cities-study

Unlikely, then, that he is some undustry beard...

ENVOI

p.232: "In these pages, I have repeatedly emphasized the complicity between subject and object of investigation. My role in this essay, as subject of investigation, has been entirely parasitical, since my only object has been the Subaltern Studies themselves. Yet I am part of their object as well. Situated within the current academic theater of cultural imperialism, with a certain carte d'entree into the elite theoretical ateliers in France, I bring news of power lines within the palace. Nothing can function without us, yet the part is at least historically ironic. What of the poststructuralist suggestion that all work is parasitical, slightly to the side of that which one wishes adequately to cover, that critic (historian) and text (subaltern) are always "beside themselves"? The chain of complicity does not halt at the closure of an essay."