This map is a fascinating and important image as it does NOT show the many sites of (ongoing) nuclear radiation contamination in communities impacted by uranium extraction and processing. For example, the Navajo Nation has around 270 unreclaimed open pit tailings piles. This is not official "waste" but is quotidian waste that creates longstanding environmental harm.
This image hides many things, including:
1. the slow but steady dispossession of smallholder (often African-American) farms that have been overtaken/bought out by Smithfield Foods to enlarge the industrial footprint of CAFOs;
2. the hogs themselves, whose hooves never touch the ground as they stand on "hog slats" inside the hangers as they move through the Fordist stages of transformation from individual animals into packaged pork;
3. the human operators, themselves, who are rarely wealthy, and are contracted for decades (or life) to purchase all "inputs" (feed, semen, etc) from Smithfield; in 2010, I took my EJ class from UNC-Chapel Hill to visit one of these operators at his CAFO, outside Raleigh, NC, and he was battling Smithfield and Duke Energy to be allowed to erect and operate a small-scale, experimental wind turbine that ran on methane captured from his pigs; years later, individual efforts at small-scale biogas would be overtaken by entities like Align LNG which now, in Sampson County, proposes the "Grady Road Project" to scale-up factory-farmed methane gas capture from much larger operations;
4. the legacy of resistance to this form of agricultural production, led by community-based intellectuals like Gary Grant, who as early as the 1980s was speaking out, traveling to state and federal lawmakers, publishing, and organizing against the growing harms of CAFOs in his home territory of Halifax County, NC. [See the suggested readings by Gary Grant and Steve Wing, Naeema Muhammed and others, that tracks this organized resistance and the formation of several community-based EJ groups in response].
The Sampson County landfill can be smelled before seen. This olfactory indicator points toward the sensory scale of these pungent emissions but also toward the geographic scope: this landfill receives waste from as far away as Orange County (the state's most expensive property/tax base), among dozens of other distant counties, making this "hazardous site" a lesson in realizing impact beyond the immediate locale. So when we answer the question, "What is this hazard?" we must think not only about the landfill as a thing in itself but as a set of economic and political relations of capital and the transit of other peoples' trash, into this lower-income, rural, predominantly African-American neighborhood. In this way, 'thinking with a landfill' (like this one in Sampson County) enables us to analyze wider sets of relationships, NIMBY-ist policymaking, consumerism, waste management, and the racialized spatial politics that enable Sampson County to be the recipient of trash from all over the state. At the same time we think spatially and in transit, we can think historically to (a) inquire about the DEQ policies that enable this kind of waste management system; and (b) the emergent "solutions" in the green energy sector that propose to capture the landfill's methane in order to render the stench productive for the future -- that is, to enable more consumption, by turning garbage into gas. As such, the idea of "hazard" can expand beyond the site itself - impactful and affective as that site might be - to examine the uneven relations of exchange and capitalist-driven values of productivity that further entrench infrastructures such as these. [This offers a conceptual corrollary to thinking, as well, about the entrenchment of CAFOs for "green" biogas development, as we address elsewhere in the platform].
I am mainly part of the research collective called “COVID-19 Places: Turkey.” I focus on the COVID-19 disaster governance and scientific cultures. So far, we have worked through google docs. By September, we plan to hold regular meetings, and add more to the PECE essay. This group welcomes new members.
I also have many questions at local, national, and transnational levels. Nevertheless, in the short-term (Fall 2020), I want to focus on the following research topics/areas:
The transnational governance of COVID-19
The ways science-society relations (and/or scientific cultures) shape and are shaped by the governance of COVID-19 in specific places (from community to institution to city to nation-state scale).
Tactics that can be developed through transnational collaboration so as to respond to the various problems deepening and/or emerging in the midst of this disaster, e.g., the problems we (may) encounter as educators, and so on.
I imagine all these as collaborative studies.
On July 3, Selim Badur has interpreted this report (Açık Radyo - Korona Günleri programme) by drawing attention to "two interesting points":
1. The highest incidences were seen in persons aged 80 years and older but the second cluster includes persons aged 25 to 49 years (49.4%).
2. In the world, it is said that men are infected more than women. In Turkey, female cases aged 15 to 24 are more than male cases.
shortly attaching this news article on "coronavirus lockdown protests" to this reading. should be an obvious one to all.
Re: the discussion on "our" concepts of freedom
--
Adding a popular quote - from Kafka's "A Report to an Academy"
I fear that perhaps you do not quite understand what I mean by "way out." I use the expression in its fullest and most popular sense—I deliberately do not use the word "freedom." I do not mean the spacious feeling of freedom on all sides. As an ape, perhaps, I knew that, and I have met men who yearn for it. But for my part I desired such freedom neither then nor now. In passing: may I say that all too often men are betrayed by the word freedom. And as freedom is counted among the most sublime feelings, so the corresponding disillusionment can be also sublime. In variety theaters I have often watched, before my turn came on, a couple of acrobats performing on trapezes high in the roof. They swung themselves, they rocked to and fro, they sprang into the air, they floated into each other's arms, one hung by the hair from the teeth of the other. "And that too is human freedom," I thought, "self-controlled movement." What a mockery of holy Mother Nature! Were the apes to see such a spectacle, no theater walls could stand the shock of their laughter.
No, freedom was not what I wanted. Only a way out; right or left, or in any direction; I made no other demand; even should the way out prove to be an illusion; the demand was a small one, the disappointment could be no bigger. To get out somewhere, to get out! Only not to stay motionless with raised arms, crushed against a wooden wall.
When I read the commentary on COVID-19 and Higher Education, it reminded me an article published in the early days of the transition to online teaching. In this article entitled "The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning," the authors emphasize the importance of naming (what we regularly refer as) online teaching as "emergency remote teaching":
"Online learning carries a stigma of being lower quality than face-to-face learning, despite research showing otherwise. These hurried moves online by so many institutions at once could seal the perception of online learning as a weak option, when in truth nobody making the transition to online teaching under these circumstances will truly be designing to take full advantage of the affordances and possibilities of the online format."
"Researchers in educational technology, specifically in the subdiscipline of online and distance learning, have carefully defined terms over the years to distinguish between the highly variable design solutions that have been developed and implemented: distance learning, distributed learning, blended learning, online learning, mobile learning, and others. Yet an understanding of the important differences has mostly not diffused beyond the insular world of educational technology and instructional design researchers and professionals. Here, we want to offer an important discussion around the terminology and formally propose a specific term for the type of instruction being delivered in these pressing circumstances: emergency remote teaching."
Let's re-read a quote in the commentary by Robert Pose in the light of above notes:
"The sudden brutal switch to online learning is the most obvious consequence for higher education of the pandemic. Everyone now accepts online teaching because everyone regards it as necessary to reduce serious health hazards. But after the pandemic recedes, it is likely economic forces will seek to keep online learning in place, because it is far cheaper than education before the pandemic."
I think we need much more nuanced and careful approach to the possibility of continuing online teaching in the aftermath of COVID-19 without reducing the discussion to the terms of economics. Since many universities have shifted to emergency remote teaching without necesarily having the required experience and infrastructure in online teaching, there appear many concerns beyond economics, at least in my university, e.g., the lack of regular communication between students and educators appear as a concern of the authorities beyond of teachers.