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Analyze

The Glass Plate

sgknowles

By Scott G. Knowles: As part of the STL Anthropocene Field Campus the research team visited the Wood Refinery Refinery History Museum on March 9, 2019. This museum is located on the grounds of the Wood River Refinery, a Shell Oil refinery built in 1917 and today owned by Phillips 66. The site is Roxana, Illinois, just upriver from Granite City, and just over two miles from the convergence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Sitting on the actual grounds of the refinery, the museum is an invitation to think across the micro, meso, and macro scales of the Quotidian Anthropocene, in terms of geography and also in terms of time. This refinery was built at the crux of the WWI, at a time when United States petrochemical production was entering an intensive phase of production, invention, corporate structuring, and global engagement. The museum is an invitation to think across temporal scales, backwards to the start of the refinery--through the individual lives of the workers and engineers whose lives defined the refinery--and forward to indeterminate points of future memory. This photo captures a key moment in an informal interview we did with one of the history guides. He had worked in the museum for decades before retiring. He explained to us that the museum sits in the former research facility of the refinery--and the glass plat he is showing reveals a beautiful artifact, a photograph made of the complex when it was built. Our guide only showed us this collection of slides after our conversation had advanced, perhaps after he was sure we were truly interested in his story, and the deeper history of the refinery. The pride in the place, the community of workers, and the teaching ability of the museum was manifest. The research team felt impressed, but also concerned about the health impacts (and naturally the environmental impacts as well) of the refinery. There was a mismatch in the scales--the memory of the individual tied to emotions of pride and knowledge of hard work done there--and the Anthropocene, global scale of petrochemicals. How do we resolve this mismatch? The glass plate is somehow a clue.

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Alexi Martin

The author is Didier Fassin, he is an anthropologist and socialogist who conducted research in Senegal, Ecuador, South AFrica and France. He used to be a doctor, but now is a professor at Princeton. He is suited in respect to emergency response because studying the people is how to help those affected by disaster.

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Alexi Martin

7. The article’s bibliography is extensive, this points out that there was time and effort put in place to gather the proper evidence in order to prove their argument. There is also a lot of supporting evidence, proving that the argument is valid.

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Alexi Martin

The aim of the program is to provide training and education in order to build and sustain nuclear programs as well as to respond to disaster. The prgoram offers hands on workshops in a variety of scopes. This is accomplished through the IEC the emergency and incident centre that provides programs for anyone who could be exposed to radition- medical personel, first responders, radiological assessors, etc.

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Alexi Martin

The author Sonja D. Schmid is an assistant progessor in STS at Virgina Tech. her areas of expertise include the history and set-up of previous Soviet Union nuclear powerplants and those in Eastern Europe. She also studies te way interational energy polices, the choice of techology and application affect each other. Her experience comes from studying the Soviet Union nuclear polices and interviewing those who had previous been involved in nuclear activites in Soviet Union nuclear industry.

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Alexi Martin

The three topics I followed up upon was the countries surrounding Ukraine and their impact from the nuclear disaster, the types of radiation poisoning as well as the long term affects, and puterpili (sufferers).

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Alexi Martin

Emergency response is mentioned in the short and long term, in terms of placing infrastructure to direct and prevent diease. The authors stressed that dealing with epidemics as they happen is important to prevent further spread of diease. While long term repsonses in the past -clinics and medications- were placed, emergency response- going there and fixing the problem was stressed.