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Assessing the PM2.5 impact of biomass combustion in megacity Dhaka, Bangladesh - PubMed (nih.gov)

This article is about crop burning in Dhaka, Bangladesh and attempts to figure out if there is more or less harmful PM2.5 particulate air pollution caused by either fossil fuels or biomass, and during which season is one or the other higher in the air pollution it produces. During monsoon season, fossil fuels lead in the most PM2.5 releases at 44.3%. When it is not monsoon season and is the winter season, the percentages are way higher for PM2.5 air particulate releases at 41.4% for the remainder of the year. Across the globe, there are now people stepping up to uncover the true and real environmental and health impacts this harmful particulate byproduct causes in different parts of the world and with differring weather conditions than what we see in North Carolina. 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351209404_PM25_Emissions_from_…;

This study is set in South/Southeast Asia and uncovering that, when trying to count the percentages of PM2.5 put off during biomass, the true amount of emissions were being gravely undercalculated. Specifically rice straw burning becuase the amount burned varied so much because of different harvest and burning practices that it just wasn't taken into consideration. What this study does is go bottom up using these strategies: "subnational spatial database of rice-harvested area, region-specific fuel-loading factors, region, and burning-practice-specific emission and combustion factors, including literature-derived estimates of straw and stubble burned"(Lasko et al. 2021, 1). 

The most common air pollutants are called criteria pollutants and are regulated by the Clean Air Act and the EPA. These pollutants are: particles, ozone, nitrogen oxides, sulfer dioxide, carbon monoxide, and lead. The EPA have sections under the CAA that help regulate factories and air pollution in the environment. For example section 108 requires the EPA to identify the pollutants that are criteria pollutants, listed above, and determine if where they are coming from and if they "endander public health or welfare". Under section 109 the EPA had to set standards across the board for air pulltion in regard to human health and to the environemtn sperately (Christopher D. Ahlers 2016, 51-52).  There are many more sections that go into detail about what the CAA can do and what the EPA members are required to do as well. 

I've been organizing and working with the Research Data KE Working Group. We have been collecting relevant links, articles and data in this essay. Some members of our group are now going deeper into thematic areas such as looking at gender and its intersection with COVID-19 in Kenya. We have a monthly call on the second Thursday of every month. We also have a WhatsApp chat group to exchange links and articles. We are open to new members, sign up here. You can find an archive of all of our calls and notes here.

I've found myself returning to thinking about/around/within interstitial spaces of care, particularly within hospital settings, interested in how viral activity unsettles the ideas we have around space and boundaries, both biological and infrastructural. In COVID-19 pathology and response, the inbetween, the interstitial, become sites challenge and possibility. With COVID-19, we see an acknowledgment of once forgotten spaces quite obviously, with hospital atria and hallways being reconfigured into patient care spaces, makeshift morgues established in refrigerated trucks, and hospitals spilling out into neighboring streets and parks. More than ever, we see how hospitals are simultaneously bounded and unbounded--the most stable and unstable sites for care. Along this line of thought, what might thinking through hospitals as heterotopia of crisis and deviation afford?

Foucault outlines six principles for heterotopic spaces

The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible

Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time—which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. This situation shows us that the cemetery is indeed a highly heterotopic place since, for the individual, the cemetery begins with this strange heterochrony, the loss of life, and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance.

Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications.

The training of and role for the (humanist?) intellectual in the world seems to be a relevant take-away point of discussion from postcolonial theory. I have been noticing a proliferation of thought pieces and various genres of writing by engaged scholars in this COVID-19 moment. While indeed there is lots to think and write about, the Late Industrial times we are in are also marked by a heavy saturation of information. Rather than feeling enlightening and motivated by the increased proliferation of opinions on COVID-19, I find it has the opposite effect. What other (new) forms of knowledge, processes for knowledge making, and ways of engaging in the world (not to mention education for critical consciousness) are needed in this moment? Perhaps unsurprisingly, I find the value and strength of new research collectives like this one to be rich spaces from which to start thinking about this question.

Ahmed describes the importance of a "humanist education" that trains the “ethical reflex” to open one up to forms of consciousness fundamentally different from one’s own. He notes that such openness eventually requires one to “rebel” against one’s training itself (developing critical consciousness?).

Ahmed also writes about the relationship where the intellectual refuses to speak for the subaltern--where the intellectual enters into a relationship with something foreign to him about which he will absolutely refuse ever to produce authoritative knowledge. "The point of the relationship is, in fact, "to question the grounds of knowledge itself."

I'm currently based in Troy, NY where I recently completed a PhD in Science and Technology Studies.  I'll soon be living in NYC to attend medical school. I can be reached at amorgan14[at]gmail[dot]com

I've long been interested in the disaster of routine medical care in the U.S. healthcare system. As far as COVID-19 is concerned, I'm particularly interested in how the long-term health impacts of intensive care are conceptualized and communicated (including Post Intensive Care Syndrome (PICS)) and the tensions between acute and chronic illness, broadly. 

How is the aftermath of COVID-19 crisis being imagined in different settings? How is this shaping beliefs, practices, and policies?

I live in the bay area in Northern California and am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine. My research has focused on shifting data ideologies in Nairobi, Kenya where I lived and worked from 2010 - 2015 and 2019. Learn more here. I can be reached at angela[dot]okune[at]gmail[dot]com.

I am especially interested in the following questions:

• How is COVID-19 knowledge and expertise moving across national borders?