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COVID-19 collaboration call: project reflections & directions (Response)

makasuarez
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I am particularly interested in comparative approaches on how different sites (and academics in those places or studying them) are thinking about COVID in their localities. How are people dealing with issues of trust and information in an era when entire archives are in danger (like the police archives in Guatemala which had been rescued in the past decade and are now in danger). This question expands beyond COVID but has become crucial in the context of Ecuador where reliable data is hard to come by. Another important aspect for us is how indigenous communities are fairing amid the pandemic (here a fabulous article on the terrible situation in Brazil—which is not so different to Ecuador's). This touches on issues of communication, infrastructure, language, systemic racism, and more. Finally, I am also interested in ways in which we might be a able to contribute to some of these issues from our academic spaces. Collaborators (which can take many forms) are certainly welcomed.

Mobilizing comedians/political commentators

makasuarez
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One of the mediums of communications that has reached well beyond the US are monologues by well-known comedians that are partly explaining, partly commenting on current BLM events. One of them is Hasan Minjah and his message We Cannot Stay Silent About George Floyd where he calls on migrants in particular to act in the face of racism rather than perpetuate it. Nearly 4 million people have seen the clip, which is part of Minjah's broader Netflix TV series The Patriot Act (who makes these videos and pays for them is also relevant here). In Ecuador, this video circulated mainly among English speaking young adults, mainly via WhatsApp. It triggered many group discussions around what is happening in the US and how we might think about this political moment with regards to our own racist history. The second video is by Trevor Noah and has over 8 million views. In it, he explains what racism means in relationship to the social contract and how it has failed for too many people. To me it is particularly interesting to see the pedagogical approach their videos take and the truly diverse audiences they speak to. The ripple effect the videos have is important for thinking about how the BLM movement has mobilized political sentiments well beyond the US and what mediums can effectively do this (and for whom).

Maka Suarez

makasuarez
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I'm a co-founder of Kaleidos - Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography, a space for academic experimentations supported by two top ranked universities in Ecuador (University of Cuenca and FLACSO-Ecuador). We are located in Cuenca, where I am assistant professor of medical anthropology. Together with a team of researchers we have been tracking covid19 with a specific focus on Latin America through Spanish language podcasts, collective texts, webinars, and online forums.

My current ethnographic interest is on documenting data distrust networks from the neighborhood scale to the national level in Ecuador, and how these networks have produced distinctive approaches (and failures) to the current pandemic.

1619 Project

ramah
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This may not be the right place to post/share this, and I am happy to delete or move it! But I wanted to make a plug for the 1619 Project, and this post in particular, as helpfully complementing some of the other readings (such as McKittrick and Moore et al) on America's plantation history.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capital…

Hazardous waste work, race, and making disaster "professions"

ramah
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I began my research for these field notes by thinking about what kind of labor becomes available in the context of disaster relief/climate change? In my teaching this week, I have been talking about Cyclone Idai and mold as an example of one of how disasters unfold over different temporalities, as in Kim’s work, and via ‘aftershocks’ (Bonilla and Lebron 2019). Thinking about mold got me googling respiratory infections/respiratory health in New Orleans, which lead me to various sites that offer hazardous waste worker training programs (including under the auspices of environmental justice/community development work - e.g. http://www.dscej.org/our-work). This seems one example, among others, of how exposure to environmental harm is transformed into new sites of professionalization. This called to mind discussions of risky labor in the context of disaster, such as in Fortun 2001 or Petryna 2002, and to the centrality of respiration to thinking about anthropocenic processes (Kenner 2019). It highlighted how that transformation of geographical exposure into professional opportunity is then refracted via race and class; while some become hazardous waste clean up experts, others become climate change experts and professionals, who deploy expertise in the wake of other storms. Other accounts (https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2018/03/06/meet-the-refugees-fighting-for-the-future-of-new-orleans/) highlighted specific communities, such as refugee communities, as key sites of resistance to energy infrastructures including a new gas plant, which is being constructed in a FEMA-designated high-risk flood zone. This short stint of googling also lead me to a number of studies of respiratory health, many using spirometric readings to calculate the impact of exposure (for instance to remediation workers involved in cleaning after Hurricane Katrina) (eg. Rando et al 2012). Having recently read Lundy Braun’s book about race and spirometry (2014), these accounts highlighted for me how racialization is built into these processes in multiple ways: not only does race (along with class, professional background, geographical situation, etc) shape who is exposed and in what ways, it also shapes the how health and harm are measured and made visible in this context.Reference:Rando, Roy, John Lefante, Laurie Freyder, & Robert Jones. 2012. Journal of Environmental and Public Health. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jeph/2012/462478/

Where/whether to place human mobility in thinking anthropocenically

ramah
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Is there a place for thinking about the relationship between the governance of human mobility and anthropogenic processes in Louisiana? Reading the Andy Horowitz piece about Hurricane Harvey and the McKittrick piece about plantations got me thinking about the governance of human mobility as central to how New Orleans, and especially storms, are narrated. The ways in which mobility is made possible or impeded are central to ’storm narratives’. At the same time, recent news has highlighted how ICE activities have been concentrated in Mississippi, Louisiana, and other parts of the South. As the Southern Poverty Law Center notes, "The South is both a destination for new immigrants seeking security in the U.S. and a staging ground for deportation.” Louisiana - although perhaps not New Orleans - seems to be a key site in which these processes are visible. For instance, a report on NBC suggested that, “the number of detainees in facilities contracted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Louisiana and Mississippi surged from just over 2,000 at the end of 2017 to more than 8,000 as of July. That’s nearly four times as many as were detained in the two states in November 2017, the numbers show. Louisiana, with a population of more than 6,500, now has the largest population of ICE detainees of any single state apart from Texas.” One reason for this increase in numbers is financial. According to the SPLC, "The South, which already has some of the highest rates of incarceration in the country, is the bargain basement of immigration detention. Facilities charge among the lowest per diem rates in the country in order to land Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracts that can create jobs for communities, revenue for municipalities and profits for private prison operators, no matter the long-term cost. It’s an approach that flows from the South’s long history of looking to prisons filled mostly with people of color as a way to build local economies – a history that includes chain gangs and programs that “leased” prisoners to companies for work. Today, immigrant detention is but the latest chapter in that history” https://www.splcenter.org/20161121/shadow-prisons-immigrant-detention-south). Yet as this quote suggests, this mode of detention is also historical, and that history seems to play out in a number of ways. Facilities used to detain migrants have often also been used as prisons (including the La Salle detention center in Jena, Louisiana), for instance. But it seems that tensions around the notion of New Orleans as a "city of refuge” (Munyikwa 2019) are long-standing. Even as today, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports highlighted Cuban immigrants/asylum seekers, so too are tensions over racialized Caribbean migration longstanding. In the aftermath of the Haitian revolution, New Orleans was a kind of “flashpoint” (Kazanjian 2003) for tensions over migration and race as both French settlers from Haiti fled to Louisiana and as Afro-Creole refugees were expelled from Cuba. One report of the 1809 migration describes how “in Louisiana, as lawmakers moved to suppress manumission and undermine the free black presence, the refugees dealt a serious blow to their efforts.” http://www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/topic.cfm;jsessionid=f8302584551566978728483?migration=5&topic=3&bhcp=1 These are all clumsy linkages, and I’m not sure I want to draw historical analogies across contexts about which I have only cursory knowledge, but it seems to me that there are linkages or repetitions of connections between labor, environment, and human mobility that for me provoke questions about the relationship between anthropocenics and regimes of human mobility and carcerality (beyond just the notion of ‘climate refugees’). Resources consulted: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/ice-detainments-surge-mississippi-louisiana-alarming-immigration-advocates-n1042696 Southern Poverty Law Center & National Lawyers’ Guildhttps://www.splcenter.org/20161121/shadow-prisons-immigrant-detention-southhttps://www.splcenter.org/news/2019/04/10/cuban-men-thrown-louisiana-prisons-despite-legal-asylum-requests http://www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/topic.cfm;jsessionid=f8302584551566978728483?migration=5&topic=3&bhcp=1 https://www.theadvocate.com/gambit/new_orleans/news/the_latest/article_8687dfba-a127-5bb9-9635-25502c2916dc.html https://nolapsc.org/human-rights/ Munyikwa, Michelle. 2019. ‘Up from the dirt’: Racializing Refuge, Rupture, and Repair in Philadelphia. Dissertation submitted to the Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania. 

Creating a mobile disaster industry

ramah
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I haven’t gone as deeply into this as I’d like, but I started by trying to find out which private firms/actors were associated with disaster response in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (beyond the groups, like Blackwater, that made headlines). What I actually found was the way in which New Orleans- and Louisiana-based firms and individuals are positioning themselves as disaster experts (or, as seems to be the preferred language, experts in resiliency and preparedness) in the wake of Katrina and subsequent storms (e.g. Isaac). So, groups involved in the initial response include companies like Beck Disaster Relief, AshBritt, Shaw Group, Korte, Fluor, Halliburton spin-offs, and Akima site contractors, but these groups have also used Katrina to position themselves or consolidate their position as disaster relief specialists. Other organizations, like Greater New Orleans Inc (GNO), Royal Engineers, Hammerman and Garner International and others, expanded from local contracting or civic bodies to national or international actors, as experience navigating not only the material landscape of Katrina but also the bureaucratic and financial landscape of FEMA became a selling point for further projects — for instance, many of these organizations went on to bid for public contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and subsequent preparedness activities. If these firms point to a genealogy of expertise spooling forward from Katrina, there are also financial genealogies that predate the privatized response to Katrina — for instance, the way Housing and Urban Development’s community development block grants (CDBGs), originally designed to promote “urban revitalization” became used as disaster relief funds. I also have not included here the key role played by humanitarian agencies and NGOs, both nationally and overseas.The other way I’ve been preparing for the Field Campus is by thinking about the stakes of claiming - in my own work or in the work of these firms - New Orleans (and especially a mass-mediated event like Katrina) as a site for authorizing and producing knowledge. To that end, thinking with Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds, and Tina Campt’s work on refusal has been helpful, since these authors are concerned in part with how the hypervisibility of Black suffering underpins so much of American political life, and locate Katrina as part of that; those texts are helping me to start thinking about what possible starting points for my thinking might exist in relation to this analytical/geographical/empirical anthropocenic space.Some media accounts and reports:https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/08/secret-history-hurricane-katrina/https://corpwatch.org/article/katrina-contractors-rake-it-they-clean-ithttps://iem.comhttps://www.nola.gov/community-development/documents/isaac-recovery-program/action-plan-amendments/cno-isaac-action-plan-amend-1/https://capitalresearch.org/article/private-sector-disaster-relief/https://resconnola.com

Maka Suarez: thinking about air pollution locally

makasuarez
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I was interested in learning about how air pollution has been talked/researched in the New Orleans area. Mainly, the need to highlight local specificities and historical analysis. A 1950s study on air pollution in New Orleans (Air Pollution and New Orleans Asthma), for instance, documented asthma incidence among black communities (sadly the article still uses the N word), and its relationship to underground fire burning in nearby dumps. The study is more comprehensive and did a census in part of the city as well as a number of medical tests on 84 individuals.

A second study, this one from 2007, documented asthma in children (Prevalence of Indoor Allergen Exposures among New Orleans Children with Asthma). It has a relevant focus of the differences between document indoor allergen exposure in different areas of the US and how subtropical weather in NOLA plays an important role in the kinds of allergies that children with asthma face. One of the main findings of the study can be summarized in the following quote “our data show that asthmatic children in New Orleans may be exposed to a greater number of allergens at moderate to high levels compared to asthmatic children living in other inner cities and to the general population.”

Finally, a third reference, the book Race, Place, and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina: Struggles to Reclaim, Rebuild, and Revitalize New Orleans and the Gulf Coast talks about something, others have already pointed out (@Omar Perez Figueroa for instance) regarding areas that undergo dramatic change and hardship after natural disasters like hurricane Katrina and Rita. This book, particularly chapter 5 (though I can’t access the full text) explains the highly toxic environment that resulted (and remains) in the New Orleans area due to little clean-up action following the disasters. Lack of funding, deference to poorly resourced local authorities, and policy-failure all affect New Orleans (and many of our sites of research) particularly the fate of vulnerable communities.

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Jacob Nelson
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I did further research into what the Disaster Accountability Project is and what they are trying to accomplish. I also looked into the NRC and how they are focused on safety of nuclear power in the US, and what some of their differences are with the DAP. Finally, I looked up the Indian Point Energy Center, in order to find out the size and scope of the plant and some of the concerns people have about nuclear power in their area

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Jacob Nelson
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The main findings of the article are that the relationship between natural disasters and communicable diseases is not as much due to dead bodies or high trauma as it is to population displacement and a lack of preparredness of the local governing body for the disaster and the crowding of survivors that follows a disaster as this