Analyze

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.

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.

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.

The author mainly draws from experience in organizational theory & disaster social issues as well as citing many specialists in the nuclear world as well as those who have hands on experience in disaster response.

The main point of the article is that doctors need individual stories about patient success stories but that the current medical community has largely done away with this. His argument is that that are needed because of their impact on patients, their use in identifying problems like depression, knowing others have felt the same or have the same condition can give hope, and they can inspire research agendas.

The IAEA finds cooperation between the industry, member countries, and the IAEA to be particularly challenging.

1) International courts came to agreement that gender based acts of violence, such as rape, constitute a crime against humanity.

2)  When gender is erased from the picture it removes the why, what, and how of the incident as well as ting to be uniform in care but also recognizing biological differences between men and women, gender differences and how that changes treatment, care, and outcome.

3) Human rights activists have been championing to address violence against women since the 1980s which later turned into “gender based violence” so that it would broaden the scope to include any gender. 

                The study was funded by the CDC which is a government organization of the United States of America.

This artifact represents a form of a precaution against the hazard of flooding and other natural disasters. This is a map showing the evcacuation routes for residents of Essex County.