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joerene.aviles

The author is Sonja D. Schmid, an associate professor at Virginia Tech in the Department of Science and Technology in Society. She specializes in STS (science, tech, and society) analysis, nuclear industries, and energy policies. In respect to emergency response, Schmid is able to use her knowledge of previous disasters, current energy technologies, and societal influences to address what we need nationally/ internationally for how we should respond to emergencies. The ability to identify the multifaceted levels of what causes disasters is important to properly responding to them- by changing technologies, training and education of communities, and changing energy policies to avoid and handle more disaster.

Publications relevant to the DSTS Network: "Evacuation from a nuclear disaster" (http://www.jstor.org/stable/214548?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents), "A comparative institutional analysis of the Fukushima nuclear disaster: Lessons and policy implications" (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421512009433)

Research focusing on nuclear waste management, developments for safer nuclear energy and studies of the nuclear arms race are also relevant to DSTS Network.

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joerene.aviles

The report implies that technical professionals have to be more careful when responding to large scale disasters; staff responding to emergencies need to have more training for the many internal challenges that would lmit care and assistance to victims. MSF discussed how they had limited man power, labs, and resources.

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joerene.aviles

1. In this sense, gender-based violence makes it clear that the suffering body – while purportedly universal – requires certain political, historical and cultural attributes to render it visible and worthy of care.

2. It seems that humanitarianism, as universalism, both erases and depends on difference; on the one hand, it manages difference, declawing it so that it doesn’t tear apart the humanitarian kit, made to fit and rehabilitate everyone into a basic bare-bones humanity.

3. In this sense, bringing gender-based violence into the humanitarian mission has inadvertently opened up a space for confrontation with politically significant forms of difference and inequality in their real and rabid forms.