Analyze

Sabina Vaught’s Compulsory challenges conventional understandings of state schooling through an ethnographic exploration of the juvenile prison school system in the United States. Vaught examines the ways in which juvenile prison and prison school are shaped by legal and ideological forces working across multiple state apparatuses. Vaught depicts these forces vividly through her ethnographic focus on Lincoln prison school, a site serving “as a window onto the massive institutional practices of juvenile schooling, knowledge production, and incarceration in the United States” (19). Her ethnography maps the network of relations converging through this site—between prisoners, teachers, state officials and mothers. In doing so, her ethnography captures an illustrative account of the institutional assemblages at work in constituting the state through material and ideological practices of dispossession and education of young Black men. She demonstrates the ways in which the state disproportionally displaces young Black men from home and subjects them to abuse, captivity, and forced submission through its educational apparatus.

 In her approach, Vaught highlights distinct spaces of interest: inside and outside the juvenile prison school system. She works with these designations to map institutional powers across different spaces, arguing that “Inside and Outside are places just as Seattle and Canada are proper nouns with distinct features, bounded space, governing rules, sociocultural symbology, and so on” (12). In mapping these spaces, Vaught is also attentive to who is present and who is absent, both discursively and materially. Absences are recognized as shaping the field in which Vaught is working—for instance, her ethnographic focus on young men in prison schools is largely an outcome of institutional practices of hiding young black women from view. In the logic of prison administrators, “girls were too vulnerable to be exposed to research” (17)—despite paradoxically deemed “dangerous” in justifying their captivity.

Vaught’s attention to absence is also explicit in her examination of removal, as a practice aimed at disrupting the private spheres of people of color through prisons and schools. Removal entails the physical relocation of students from their homes to schools, where “they are subject to meaningless or hostile captive educational performances” (321). Removal, as Vaught demonstrates, is essential to the continuous construction of the US as a White, heteropatriarchal nation.

More specifically, removal disables the possibility of a Black private sphere by disrupting kinship relations between young Black men and their families and making young Black men into prisoners. Removal acts as an assault “on Black women as custodians of the house of resistance, on Black boys as figments of White criminal imaginations who antithetically define White male innocence and citizenship, and on Black girls as both hyperaggressive and broken ghost victims” (321). The state works to supplant other social and family relations with carceral kinship relations, which normalize and legitimize the removal process. This process is further reinforced with the psychological manipulation of young men through state-imposed “treatment,” which corrodes their sense of free will and promotes feelings of internal, individual culpability for their exclusion from citizenship.

Vaught argues that this disruption of Black private spheres is significant because these are important spaces of resistance, in which counter publics are formed. In the United States, “the public” is leveraged as a tool of white supremacist control in limiting the power of some. Rights themselves are exclusive and private—limited to those possessing property, a condition of whiteness dependent on the exclusion of people of Color. Dispossession and education are practices that maintain and rationalize this exclusivity, as young Black men are denied the possibilities of citizenship. These practices serve to protect the interests of the White state, to which the potential emergence of private Black citizens (and their potential publics) act as threats: “White freedom, will, and fitness for self-governance exist only through the ideological and structural denial of those very things in Black people” (322).

In her attention to the interrelations between the white supremacist state, prison schooling, and critical scholarship, Vaught offers direction for activists and scholars invested in social justice and education—particularly in her critique of the school-to-prison pipeline, which draws attention to the limitations of reform. As an apparatus of the state, schools are meant to function as prison pipelines. Scholars and activists applying the prison-to-pipeline logic in advocating for education reform overlook this essential fact and “unintentionally confirm the principal, most damaging misconception of school: that it is good” (37). Vaught’s Compulsory supports and gives life to alternative theoretical approaches focused on the racist organization of schools in relation to prisons. In this, Vaught exemplifies her approach to theory as stewardship: theory is “a stewardship of a kinship network of meaning. It is not just an abstraction we take up and give life to page by page but rather a living force that in some ways takes us up” (41). Ultimately, Vaught’s theoretical stewardship offers meaningful direction for scholars and activists: “State schooling … is the beating heart of a supremacist state. … To take on the heart of the state requires further mapping its reaches” (323).

Flammable is an account of how people in a particular place make sense of slow, invisible environmental pollution. The people of Flammable live in an Argentinean shantytown located next to petrochemical companies and storage facilities. They have been deeply affected by the rise in unemployment in the 1990s, with most residents subsisting on part-time manual jobs at one of the companies, retirement pensions, state welfare programmes and what else they can find. The area in which these residents live is known and recognized by government experts to be contaminated and unsafe for human habitation–and yet widespread confusion and uncertainty amongst residents and a lack of government actions means that the shantytown continues to exist. Auyero and Swistun explore the multitude of influences that ‘‘shape what people see, what they don’t see, what they know, what they don’t know, and what they would like to know, what they do and what they don’t do’’ (145). They show how residents gradually naturalize their situations, which, combined with the mystification of dominant discourses, contributes to their quiescence in the face of contamination. 

Hoover’s book is an analysis of the material and psychosocial effects of industrial pollution along the St. Lawrence River, which runs through the Mohawk community of Akwesasne. Hoover focuses on resistance to private and state efforts at land enclosures and economic rearrangements.  Hoover shows how legacy of industrialization and pollution (GM and Alocoa, primarily) ruptured Mohawk relationships with the river, and incurred on tribal sovereignty by disturbing the ability to safely farm, garden, raise livestock, gather, and recreate in ways fostered important connections between and amongst people and the land (“ecocultural relationships”). Hoover describes how confusion about risk and exposure is culturally produced and develops the "Three Bodies" analytic framework to show how individual, social and political bodies are entangled in the process of social and biophysical suffering. 

Hoover also highlights how in response to pollution, Mohawk projects of resistance emerged - a newspaper, documentary films, and  community-based health impacts research. Hoover conducts a comparative history of two research projects tracking the effects on industrial-chemical contamination on Akwesasne people and wildlife: the Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s epidemiological study in the 1980s, which failed to engage Akwesasne people in the production of knowledge or share results meaningfully, and the SUNY-Albany School of Public Health Superfund Basic Research Program study (in the 1990s and 200s), which ultimately began incorporating key theoretical and methodological principles of CBPR.

Hoover’s book is an analysis of the material and psychosocial effects of industrial pollution along the St. Lawrence River, which runs through the Mohawk community of Akwesasne. Hoover focuses on resistance to private and state efforts at land enclosures and economic rearrangements.  Hoover shows how legacy of industrialization and pollution (GM and Alocoa, primarily) ruptured Mohawk relationships with the river, and incurred on tribal sovereignty by disturbing the ability to safely farm, garden, raise livestock, gather, and recreate in ways fostered important connections between and amongst people and the land (“ecocultural relationships”). Hoover describes how confusion about risk and exposure is culturally produced and develops the "Three Bodies" analytic framework to show how individual, social and political bodies are entangled in the process of social and biophysical suffering. 

Hoover also highlights how in response to pollution, Mohawk projects of resistance emerged - a newspaper, documentary films, and  community-based health impacts research. Hoover conducts a comparative history of two research projects tracking the effects on industrial-chemical contamination on Akwesasne people and wildlife: the Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s epidemiological study in the 1980s, which failed to engage Akwesasne people in the production of knowledge or share results meaningfully, and the SUNY-Albany School of Public Health Superfund Basic Research Program study (in the 1990s and 200s), which ultimately began incorporating key theoretical and methodological principles of CBPR.

Roberts describes their ongoing bioethnographic collaboration with a team of exposure scientists who are working in environmental engineering and health. Though ethnography is not easily enumerated, Roberts emphasizes that integrating it with quantitative data is worthwhile and makes for “better numbers”. As an example, Roberts describes 3 bioethnographic projects on neighborhoods, water distribution, and employment and chemical exposures. These projects were part of a longitudinal birth-cohort study in Mexico City called Early Life Exposures in Mexico to ENvironmental Toxicants (ELEMENT), created to understand the effects of early-life nutrition and exposure to toxicants (such as lead and phenols). Overtime, this project was expanded to include the study of new toxins (e.g. BPAS, mercury, and fluoride) and new health concerns (e.g. obesity, meopause, sleep).

Roberts’ focus on neighborhoods was produced from the ethnographic observation that neighborhood characteristics might influence exposure levels. Following this observation, Roberts’ and ELEMENT researchers sorted participants by neighborhood and identified significant differences in blood-lead levels. Additionally, Roberts applied previous ethnographic observation and scholarship to argue that high levels of toxicants like lead correlate with the capacity of neighborhoods to withstand other dangers, such as police violence. These findings prompted the development of two new bioethnographic project centered on water and the effect of neighborhood dynamics on health.

The authors review literature on the datafication of health, which they identify as the way through which health has been quantified on a number of different scales and registers. They focus primarily on the datafication of health in clinical health care and self-care practices, rather than medical research and public health infrastructures. From this literature, they identify three key themes: datafied power (the ways through which data permeates and exerts power over forms of life), living with data (focused on datafication as an intimate form of surveillance, and a technology of the self), and data-human mediations (which emphasizes the nonhuman elements mediating datafication dynamics and experiences—such as algorithms, data infrastructure and data itself).

In examining literature on datafied power, the authors acknowledge a lack of scholarship on understanding data and datafication in terms agency, rather than simply power and domination. For instance, data is sometimes mobilized in “creative and even pioneering ways (Rapp 2016)” (265).

They describe literature on “living with data” as increasingly focus examining the social, narrative, and affective dimensions of data practices and experiences (e.g. work on the “Quantified Self,” a group seeking self-knowledge through numbers – a form of relationality that might be described as datasociality). Some scholars have argued that data can render “‘feelings and problems more tangible and comparable” (Sharon & Zandbergen 2016, p. 11)” (267). Some have also acknowledged as well a “curious resonance between the vision of empowered, resisting individuals that many ethnographers of self-tracking celebrate, and the rhetoric of consumer empowerment found in discourses of digital health (Schull 2017, Sharon 2017)” (267).

The literature on data-human mediations emphasizes the agency, liveliness and/or performativity of nonhuman elements—essentially, how they structure and shape the possibilities for action. For instance: “as social expectations of normality and health become embedded in tracking devices’ target numbers, presentation of scores, and gamified incentives (Depper & Howe 2017, Whitson 2013), a “numerical ontology” comes to suffuse everyday practices and “the ways in which people relate to their own bodies” (Oxlund 2012, p. 53; see also Jethani 2015, p. 40)” (269). Perspectives and action can be enabled or disabled by wide variety of factors: the design and performativity of data technology software (user interface, operational and analytical algorithms), hardware (devices, sensors), data itself (as illustrated in different ways), and data infrastructures (labs, data centers, serve and cloud storage, and networks that organize how data is stored and circulated). An analytically constructive focus in this literature has emerged by applying the concept of “assemblage” as a way of tracing how data moves: “where it flows, where it finds impasses, how algorithms act on it along the way” (270).

Lastly, the authors identify scholarship on “data activism” as an emerging focus on exploring how data technology capacities might be employed to promote social justice, collective action, and political participation, as well as to challenged dominant norms and ideologies: “Individual self-tracking data, for instance, can have social and political potential when it is pooled to identify health inequalities, collective environmental exposure, or disparities in quality of life (Gabrys 2014).” (271)

Drawing on a long career as a Black critical health equity researcher, Bowleg quotes Black feminist Audre Lorde in arguing that the “master’s tools”—in order words, conventional theories and methods—"will never dismantle the master’s house”—intersectional structures of oppression from which health inequities are produced. Bowleg elaborates by explaining that conventional theories and methods “valorize almost exclusively individualistic and social cognitive approaches (Cochran & Mays, 1993; Weber & Parra-Medina, 2003); ignore the foundational roots of structural and intersectional inequality (Bowleg, 2012, 2020); center White, Western, cisgender male, middle-class, and heterosexual people and their experiences as normative (Henrich et al., 2010); prioritize amelioration, not transformation (Fox et al., 2009a); and view Black people primarily through the lens of deficit or pathology” (237).

Thus Bowleg offers 10 critical lessons for Black and other health equity researchers of color that she links with system and structural-level strategies. Bowleg also cautions that these lessons are risky and could damage one’s academic career—but that it is exactly this kind of risk that is necessary for change. Among these include: embrace critical perspectives, embrace a critical qualitative stance, learn research paradigms (e.g. positivist paradigm = a master’s tool, must learn to counter), foster community-based partnerships and collaborations, and highlight black communities’ strengths, assets, and acts of resistance. Bowledge also encourages researchers to “tell it like it is”: “Epistemological ignorance is one of the master’s most formidable tools. Epistemologies of ignorance refer to the examination of different types of ignorance and their production, maintenance, and functions (Sullivan & Tuana, 2007)” (239). Here, Bowleg emphasizes the importance of language by discussing how it can alternatively reveal or obscure structures of oppression as well as it shapes the nature of research.

Toxic Truths examines the relationship between citizen science and environmental justice in a post-truth age. Debates over science, facts, and values have long been an integral component of environmental justice struggles. However, post-truth politics threaten science in increasingly extreme ways: “rarely have science and expertise been so questioned, diminished, and vulnerable as they are today” (3). Through various case studies, the authors make a case for the significance of science, knowledge, and data as it is produced “by and for ordinary people living with environmental risks and hazards” (3), though they also recognize the limitations of data. They demonstrate how environmental justice activists both challenge and rely on science.

The authors recognize the lack of clear and specific definition for “environmental injustice” or “environmental justice” is part of its enduring appeal, though they pinpoint the crux of the concept as “based on the principle that all people have the right to be protected from environmental threats and to benefit from living in a clean and healthy environment” (4). Disproportionate vulnerabilities to environmental hazards amongst racialized lines has been linked by environmental activism and research to the idea of environmental racism in the United States.

The authors emphasize that despite suggestions that humans have entered a new age of toxicity (“the Anthropocene”), pollution is a product of centuries of unequal social relations. For instance, environmental inequality has come hand in hand with settler colonialism since at least the seventeenth century. Moreover, the authors emphasize that environmental injustice occurs in many different places, in different ways—and that the concept of environmental justice has traveled far beyond its origins in the United States. They seek to represent this global breadth in through case studies from across different countries and continents: “Through these chapters we will see how environmental justice is spatially dispersed, reaching far beyond the confines of the USA and the racialized geographies of the Deep South where the phrase “environmental justice” was first coined (Bullard 1990)” (6).

Davies and Mah also elaborate on what they mean by “justice” in environmental justice. While acknowledging the plurality and diversity of what justice can mean, they focus on three specific forms of justice: distributive (geographical); procedural (participatory); and capabilities (well-being). In elaborating on distributive justice, the authors noted that as environmental justice research and activism has moved beyond the racialized geographies of the United States, there has been a real need to expand notions justice beyond this geographic frame.

Procedural justice focuses on the need to involve those most affected by environmental injustice in decision-making (e.g. in developing, implementing and enforcing laws, regulations and policies). The authors highlight Barbara Allen’s research in southern France as a prime example of this form of justice. They also acknowledge that procedural justice can depend too strongly on the state and the legal system to protect those that are already being injured by the very structures of toxicity that compose the state.

The authors draw on American philosopher Martha Nussbaum and Indian economist Amartya Sen in highlight capabilities as a third form of justice. They define this form of justice as “centered around the ability of individuals to live freely and unhindered in the world” (5). This form of justice is focused on ensuring the wellbeing of a population and people’s ability to live a life they consider worthwhile. However, this form of justice has be criticized for emphasizing too strongly the significance of individual experiences of injustice, rather than providing attention to the wider community and the structural forces that sustain inequality. This aligns with Pulido’s critique of environmental injustice as overly focused on procedure and inattentive to structures of inequality and pollution reduction.

Such criticisms have produced new iterations of environmental justice, focused on “four pillars of critical environmental justice”: attention to intersectional inequality, scale as an importance factor in the production and potentially resolution of environmental injustices, the embeddedness of social inequalities in state power, and the indispensability of people, beings, and things that have been excluded, marginalized, and othered.  

The authors turn to the role of science in environmental justice by listing the terms through which this application has been described: citizen science, but also civic science, popular epidemiology, street science, community-based participatory research, and participatory sensing. They describe calls for the democratization of science and expertise as the historical origins of this form of science. Yet they also remain cautiously critical about the capacity of citizen science for enacting environmental justice, noting that public participation must not be viewed as a cure-all for solving environmental inequalities.

“Post-truth” refers to struggles for control over determining what is possible through theories of truth and knowledge. Backlash against the term raises the point that debates over truth have a long history. In examining the role of truth in environmental justice, the authors emphasize the significance of scientific knowledge for making toxic issues visible—as well as the problem of ‘undone science” (Frickel et al. 2010), because of which the health risks of pollution are often overlooked. They argue that the threats science faces in the post-truth age jeopardize the ability to make environmental health claims. And yet they acknowledge that science itself is not enough: “if political structures go unchanged, environmental injustice will persist” (14). This raises the question: “ ‘What kind of science can serve as ‘changeagent’ knowledge – what are the ingredients that can facilitate action?’ (14).

 The authors examine the practice of “hot spotting,” a form of surveillance and intervention through which health care systems in the US intensively direct health and social services towards high-cost patients.  Health care hot spotting is seen as a way to improve population health while also reducing financial expenditures on healthcare for impoverished people. The authors argue that argue that ultimately hot spotting targets zones of racialized urban poverty—the same neighborhoods and individuals that have long been targeted by the police. These practices produce “a convergence of caring and punitive strategies of governance” (474). The boundaries between the spaces of healthcare and policing have shifted as a “financialized logic of governance has come to dominate both health and criminal justice” (474).