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I would like to host part of a call to help those interested in working on  a rapid COVID-19 Community Case Study in their area, then later host another call to share results. 

I’ll teach with the COVID Community Case Study Assignment in a fall lower division undergraduate class, “Environmental Injustice.” 

I’ll work with Tim Schütz to build a Zotero bibliography and digital collection of research, news and commentary focused on connections between COVID-19 and environmental injustice -- for use in fall teaching (in a lower division undergraduate class, “Environmental Injustice”).  This will support the COVID Community Case Study Assignment in the COVID-19 Ethnographic Portfolio Project.  

I’ll also work with Tim to build a digital collection focused on COVID-19 in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana (USA), a COVID-19 and environmental injustice hotspot. This collection will contribute to our set of place essays.   It also will be part of  a digital tour of St. John the Baptist Parish that we are designing for students, collaborating with the Whitney Plantation, a rare (if not singular) plantation museum focused on and honoring the lives of enslaved people.  The chemical plants in St. John the Baptist Parish were built on the foundation of sugar plantations.  We hope to build a powerful case demonstrating both compound vulnerabilities and ways racism and injustice are historically produced. 

I’m part of the  “Higher Education, Grief, and Loss in COVID-19”  Working Group associated with the Hazard Research Center’s CONVERGE project.  The goal is to bring critical insights from scholarship on loss, grief and collective recovery in varied setting  into our highed classrooms.  The group is still working out its way of working, with plans to start by building a shared bibliography. 

I have many questions, but to start: 

I’d like to build perspective on the types of social science research being done on COVID-19 in different settings, reading through the research agendas collected by CONVERGE, for example, abstracts of NSF RAPID awards in the social sciences, and the short articles published by the Social Science Research Council.   It will be a challenge just to build a collection of lists like these to (slowly) work through.  I see this as a way to understand the discursive formations emerging around COVID-19, giving us a sense of gaps, risks and issues that especially need attention by STS researchers. 

From Roberto: I took the liberty of reaching out to the disaster research and practitioner community via the RADIX listserv to see what their thoughts are on the inclusion of war and terrorist attacks within the category of disasters. In my query, I specified that my interest was in the ways academics, and particularly anthropologists, thought about this issue in theoretical/analytical terms. I was hoping to make a clear distinction between the inclusion of war and attacks in policy, as that may follow more a vital systems security type of governmental justification, but it is interesting that, in their responses, the respondents moved back and forth between academic and governmental definitions of disasters. One comment was particularly insightful, bringing up alternative concepts other than disaster that may be more inclusive. People like Katiana Lementec, for example, has used the term "upheavals" to bring disaster scholarship and development induced disaster/displacement like the building of the Three Gorges Dam. One respondent brought up "complex emergencies," and we could also include "crisis" as one of the more inclusive terms, but these terms also bring with them the baggage of ignoring the historical political ecology or longue durée of catastrophes and reducing our focus to the immediate emergency. I asked those who replied if I could share their thoughts with the Disaster STS group and they agreed, so I copied and pasted their responses in the word document that is attached.

• Disaster governance -- and legitimation of particular modes of governance -- has been different in different historical periods and settings. Historian Michele Landis Dauber (year?), for example, describes how New Dealers had to frame the Great Depression as a disaster -- “afflicting citizens through no fault of their own” - in order to secure and legitimate federal aid to those in need. Focusing on more recent developments, John Hannigan, describes how “a humanitarian aid model for dealing with disasters became widely accepted in international affairs during the 1970s and 1980s; faltered in the 1990s; and is currently being challenged by a new approach to disaster management wherein risk management and insurance logic replace humanitarian concern as guiding principles” (2013, 1)" (quoted in Fortun et al. 2016) 

• While organized to address immediate needs, disaster response often lays ground for enduring structures of different kinds. A literally concrete example is how temporary housing for disaster survivors often becomes permanent housing, though under-designed for this. A more general examples is given by MIchale Landis Dauber in her description of the way federal aid to people in need during the Great Depression in the United States laid ground for a truncated and compromised form of the welfare state that we still live in -- turning on “suspicion that those in need are reasonable for their own deprivation.” 

Page 157: ".. it is much easier to develop an anticapitalist critique of climate change than it is to develop a theoretical and practical vision of postcapitalist social relations that might be adequate to the warmer planet on which we will have no choice but to live."

Page 158: "Similarly, our contradictory yes-but-no stance regarding global climate politics—structured entirely on the basis of sovereign territorial nation-states, which are taken as the natural and only viable building block for the struggle— has prevented us from taking on the nation-state, both analytically and practically. Of course, movements for climate justice all over the world have bravely confronted particular nation-states’ elites and institutions of governance. But the question of the legitimacy and naturalness of the modern nation-state as the base unit of global political life is rarely raised, at least way to sustain a livable planet. Beyond some “realist” argument based in path dependency, however, there is no reason to think so, and many more reasons to suggest that the state is likely one of our biggest obstacles…. “But the question of the legitimacy and naturalness of the modern nation-state as the base unit of global political life is rarely raised, at least partly because we too are convinced that (at least at present) interstate “global cooperation” is the only way to sustain a livable planet.”

Page 162-3: "In other words, as Horkheimer says, we cannot leave open the question of what we believe in with the mute hope that it will get worked out as the movement progresses. Neither, as Adorno cautions, can we paint a picture of a positive utopia, the unworldliness of which is no more helpful than when Marx and Engels admonished against it in the original manifesto more than a century and a half ago. Adorno suggests that what is required is not an account of a perfect world we can hold in our minds like a dream that can be realized merely because we can dream it, but instead an account of the possible (futures we can come to identify as potential outcomes of our present) in which things can (not will) “come right in the end.” Adorno seems to think this will entail the emergence of a radically new form of political authority, for which we might attempt to “formulate some guiding political principles.” We propose at least three such principles as fundamental to any presently emergent or future Climate X. The first is equality….  This leads to the second guiding political principle: the inclusion and dignity of all. This is a critique of capitalist sovereignty and the thin form of democracy upon which it has come to rely. Democracy is not majority rule and has little to do with the vote. Rather, democracy exists in a society to the extent that anyone and everyone could rule, could shape collective answers to collective questions. No nation-state today meets this criterion. This demands a struggle for inclusion The third principle is solidarity in composing a world of many worlds. Against planetary sovereignty, we need a planetary vision without sovereignty.”