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Anonymous (not verified)
Lee argues that EJ practice has long stagnated over an inability to properly define the concept of disproportionate (environmental and public health) impacts, but that national conversations on system racism and the development of EJ mapping tools have improved his outlook on the potential for better application of the concept of disproportionate impact. Lee identifies mapping tools (e.g. CalEnviroScreen) as a pathway for empirically based and analytically rigorous articulation and analysis of disproportionate impacts that are linked to systemic racism. In describing the scope and nature of application of mapping tools, Baker highlights the concept of cumulative impacts (the concentration of multiple environmental, public health, and social stressors), the importance of public participation (e.g. Hoffman’s community science model), the role of redlining in creating disproportionate vulnerabilities, and the importance of integrating research into decision making processes. Baker ultimately argues that mapping tools offer a promising opportunity for integrating research into policy decision making as part of a second generation of EJ practice. Key areas that Lee identifies as important to the continued development of more effective EJ practice include: identifying good models for quantitative studies and analysis, assembling a spectrum of different integrative approaches (to fit different contexts), connecting EJ research to policy implications, and being attentive to historical contexts and processes that produce/reproduce structural inequities.

Rabach Theorizing Place and Covid 19

kaitlynrabach

Mishuana Goeman in Mark My Words talks about remapping as a way of rethinking space and temporality, so the future is driving the study of the past and the past is interrogated for the future.

Goeman uses the fiction of Native women to push forth the idea that words don’t only represent reality, arguing that by using narrative “in (re)mapping, we as Native people have the power to rethink the way we engage with territory, with our relationships to one another, and with other Native nations and settler nations” (38–39).

So imagining spatial encounters and relationships is actually a way of mapping alternative relationships

Massey’s understanding of space is the “product of interrelations,” “spheres of possibility,” “and always under construction or a simultaneity of stories-so-far” (6-7), so space is a meeting of histories.

What histories are meeting now? Maybe more importantly, whose histories are meeting? I think this is where scalar analysis can come in to complement Massey’s thinking about space.. to start to tease out a bit these entangled encounter or meeting space, knowing it will never fully be disentangled.

 

Also, when think about Massey’s line of space as a meeting place, something always in transit, I’m thinking specifically of encounters. And space/place as encounter. And stay at home orders rethink the way many of us are encountering each other, also in certain contexts, especially for those with the privilege of staying at home, change encounters are being lost. The sort of tranistness of space is being lost.

Rabach Theorizing Place and Covid 19

kaitlynrabach

I’ve been thinking a bit with Elizabeth Povinelli’s use of “abject” status (the excess, to cast away, the throw away) which she pulls from Judith Butler and spaces of liminality. The subjective experience of an abject status intersects so harshly with systems of power, the economy, national policy, etc. So, thinking about spaces of abjection. Who occupies this space during this time? How is it changed? How is it being embodied?

Gonzales, Roberto G., and Leo R. Chavez. 2012. “‘Awakening to a Nightmare’: Abjectivity and Illegality in the Lives of Undocumented 1.5-Generation Latino Immigrants in the United States.” Current Anthropology 53 (3): 255–81. https://doi.org/10.1086/665414.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2012. “BEYOND THE NAMES OF THE PEOPLE: Disinterring the Body Politic.”Cultural Studies 26 (2–3): 370–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.636206.

RabachK Theorizing Place and Covid 19

kaitlynrabach

In our group we had Dr. Jessica Sewell come speak to us a little while ago about her book Women and the Everyday City and we landed on the topic of “imaginaries of space” for a long time. And the visual politics of space- so how do we notice things? What do we notice? What seems out of place or in place. Thinking about how imaginaries make certain presences completely invisible (thinking here about gendered labor, black labor, and more). And how powerful imaginaries are, how they intersect with our construction of language. But also how resistance can work with these imaginaries.. thinking about women’s sort of take over of dept stores during the suffrage movement as an extension of their private space, a space for organizing. This is long winded way of trying to think through COVID-19 national models in the context of national imaginaries. What has been puzzling me is so many Americans’ response to the Swedish model of governing in Covid and how imaginaries of Sweden have been warped in such a way that there is a complete erasure of how xenophobic policies have gained traction in Sweden in recent years.  

Rabach_Theorizing Place and Covid 19

kaitlynrabach

Gendered Spaces – We keep seeing these headlines over and over  (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/world/coronavirus-women-leaders.html) and I think there’s a lot more analysis that needs to happen here.. But women leaders = success in governance in these reports and I think we should complicated this more. What does this look like from the scale of the body to national political offices?

 

Failed governance - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/07/michigan-lawmaker-armed-escort-rightwing-protest

^ For many this is failure, but for others the ability to have militarized weapons in the state capitol is a success. So how do we blur the boundaries between success/failure?

 

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tiago.dossanto…

EPA is doing its best to try and minimize the extend of the air pollution in Newark. They are trying to make life better for the ironbound community, that deals with a big problem when it comes to air pollution, since its near the second biggest port in the country. They provide training for citizens so they can use the machines that look up how much pollution is in the air, annd with that information the population can do as they please. This program is not only for the ironbound community, it can be use troughout the country so the population can have control on the air pollution and do something about it if they want.

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Anonymous (not verified)
" Then, after the scale of the disaster had sunk in and victims began to realize they were barred by the local and federal authorities from returning home, another kind of trauma set in. Families had to find a place to live, a way to replace lost income, a place for their children to go to school, a way to obtain their prescription medications and telephones, a way to pay mounting unpaid bills for homes they no longer inhabited. Without their personal documents, they had to try to track insurance policies, if they had them, bank accounts, and health records, to begin the slow process of accessing government or insurance funds to help pay for their displacement and their hoped-for recovery. The reality of how much had been destroyed, not just in personal physical property but in whole communities, whole ways of life, had just begun to be felt" "The ongoing conditions of displacement have prompted some to report that, despite the length of time since the actual disaster, New Orleans is still in a state of “responding” rather than “recovery.”4 This ongoing predicament is key to understanding that what we are calling “chronic disaster syndrome” is different from posttraumatic stress disorder, in which traumatic events are isolated in time and symptoms are related to events in the past. In the case of Katrina displacement, conditions that are traumatic continue; they are ongoing. " " “Cleaning up the mess” in this case included a deliberate effort to get rid of the poorest sectors of the population, who were seen as a drain on public resources— those who lived in public housing. The notion that subverting support for public-sector recovery and using disaster to enrich private contractors by evicting and “erasing” the poor were part of a deliberate plan was affirmed for residents when they heard one of their state lawmakers say, in regard to the loss of public housing from the storms and flooding, that “God did what we could not do.""