Analyze

~10 PhD students across multiple institutions are working together with faculty (also from multiple institutions) to advance ethnographic practice can contribute to understanding myriad perspectives on environmental and climatological urgency. Conducting research during the program, students will share perspectives on their individual projects in Africa, Latin America, Asia or Europe. Non-academic partners also contribute to the interdisciplinary and community-engaged training. More on the project overview and objective can be found here: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101073542 

• I looked into the accusations of fraud and wrongdoing against the government that were made in the article, much of which is true. The director of FEMA, Michael D. Brown, was initially praised for the response but later forced to resign over accusations of recklessness. The New Orleans Mayor at the time, Nagin, was arrested in 2014 for fraud and corruption.
• The article mentioned separating children from their parents during the initial evacuation of survivors, I looked into the rationale behind separating families. The only reason I could find for the separation of children was to prioritize their evacuation, children were rescued from houses first and then bussed to other cities while the resources to transport their parents were still unavailable. While this is an admirable goal, to rescue as many children as possible, in a disorganized situation such as an evacuation this can lead to families separated for months due to a lack of available information.
• The article provided statistics on the growth of New Orleans after several years, I looked at the current state of New Orleans. While the city has been mostly rebuilt many residents still claim that the city is not the home they had before Katrina. The process of rebuilding massive parts of the city has changed it significantly, and not all residents are happy with the changes. 

The bibliography of this article shows that it was written using the data and observations available in many other papers, and interviews conducted previously. It does not appear that any new data was gathered specifically for this article.

• “The legacy of Chernobyl has been used as a means of signaling Ukraine's domestic and international legitimacy and staking territorial claims; and as a venue of governance and state building, social welfare, and corruption.” (253)
• “In a place of tremendous economic desperation, people competed for work in the Zone of Exclusion, where salaries were relatively high and steadily paid. Prospective workers engaged in a troubling cost-benefit assessment that went some- thing like this: if I work in the Zone, I lose my health. But I can send my son to law school.” (253)
• “The issue at stake is the state's capacity to produce and use scientific knowledge and nonknowledge to maintain political order.” (258)

The main argument is supported primarily with a detailed description of the events surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi plant disaster on March 11th, 2011 as an example of the need for a specilized group to respond to nuclear emergencies. Schmid also supports the effectiveness of such a group by tracing the recent shift in opinion away from an accident prevention mindset to the idea that nuclear disasters are a risk in the nuclear industry and therefore plans for the effective response to future nuclear disasters must be made in order to mitigate the damage caused. Several other works addressing similar problems in risk management, such as Risk Society by Ulrich Beck, as also cited to support the main argument.

• “… illness narratives - both the corpus of story episodes and the larger life "story" or illness narrative to which they contribute - have elements in common with fiction. They have a plot; succession is ordered as history or event, given configuration.” (164)
• “The diverse accounts of the illness in these narratives represent alternative plots, a telling of the story in different ways, each implying a different source of efficacy and the possibility of an alternative ending to the story. My point is not that persons having access to a plural medical system do not simply choose among alternative forms of healing but instead draw on all of them” (155)
• “Predicament, human striving, and an unfolding in time toward a conclusion are thus central to the syntax of human stories, and all of these, as we will see, are important to stories about illness experience.” (145)

The main argument is that susceptibility to certain diseases is not only determined by biology but also social conditions, leading to a disproportionate disease rate among the poor, and minority groups without access to medical services. The author shows that addressing these social conditions leads to a decrease in disease when combining treatment and prevention plans.

The author Miriam Ticktin is a professor of Anthropology at the New School, she has worked in the fields of Women’s Studies and English Literature. Her research focuses on medicine and science and its connection to feminist theory.

The authors, Andrew Lakoff and Stephen Collier both study anthropology. They have written several papers together focusing on the social and cultural types of knowledge concerning health and medicine. Lakoff works at the University of Southern California and Collier is the Director of Anthropology for the New School.

The system relies on the basic technical aspects of a smartphone, including a working camera, data, and the ability to access a contacts list. This suggests some form of partnership with the service providers of users phones, which is commonly the case with smartphone apps.