Analyze

What I find really noteworthy in this text is how Julia Watts Belser takes the poem by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and includes it into a scientific text. In this way, she not only allows an affected person to have her say, the poem also leaves the reader with a very striking image of the connection between the river and the body, in multiple ways, as well as the connection between enviromental harm and disability.

The text was published in 2020 (Vol. 40, No. 4) by The Ohio State University Libraries in their Journal Disability Studies Quarterly (DSQ). It is, as you can read on their Homepage "a multidisciplinary and international journal of interest to social scientists, scholars in the humanities and arts, disability rights advocates, and others concerned with the issues of people with disabilities. It represents the full range of methods, epistemologies, perspectives, and content that the field of disability studies embraces. DSQ is committed to developing theoretical and practical knowledge about disability and to promoting the full and equal participation of persons with disabilities in society."

The author connects disability theories and activism with environmental justice, this approach allows her to show how disability is related to and through environmental harm, she shows how diagnoses are used politically in these cases, and looks critically at how these processes determine how, when and in what favor human and environmental harm is taken into account. The writing is shaped by the consequences of the Anthropocene like environmental harm linked to health isusses, especially affected are communities of color and poor communities in the United States, here pre-existing patters of structural inequality, already known from climate change come into play,  this communities are the most affected and the least responsible.

The text left me with a question that I actually often find frustrating in the process of research. On page 6, the authors take up the criticism of a Fukushima resident who says: “[W]hat you call research does not give benefits to local people” (Miyamoto and Ankei, 2008, cited in Ankei, 2013, p.24). The authors here suggest adopting or borrowing terms from the field that are used by citizens to create a more “socially robust science” (Bonhoure et al. 2019, Nowotny, 2003). From the authors' point of view, this can be achieved above all by paying closer and careful attention to the language of citizen organizations and the contexts these groups work in. After further elaboration, the authors call for citizen science terms and concepts developed by, for and with citizens to better reflect the values, priorities, and stakes of its main agents and of all concerned parties. But I am not sure that this approach alone would be sufficient to adequately address such expressed criticism. Perhaps one should ask about the expectations of people one is researching with/about in order to enter into a conversation and to be able to understand this criticism. Perhaps the authors will address this point again in further publications. I think to ask oneself how to deal with this criticism methodically and ethically could also be very fruitful for empirical research in general.

Byron J. Good, the author of this book is currently a professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard, with his research focusing on mental health services development in Asian societies, particularly in Indonesia. He has done collaborative work with the International Organization for Migration on developing mental health services in post-tsunami and post-conflict Aceh, Indonesia. More broadly, he works on the theorization of subjectivity in contemporary societies.

The main point was to discuss the controversy between these two, very different, safety and education zones for Nuclear disasters

Miriam heavily references an article published by MSF about what they could have done better post-Congo

She also references media analysis and reports by other humanitarian organisations on the same topic.

Finally she uses this knowledge to argue that humanitarian aid and/or politics needs rethinking because of these faults in incorporating gender-based issues

This study looks at the connection between structural violence (social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harms way) to the spread of HIV/AIDs in America and abroad. Instead of looking at HIV/AIDs as a disease that is spread due to an individual’s lifestyle and decisions, it approaches the disease as something that aggregates disproportionately in impoverished communities. This same methodology is applied to the prevalence of pediatric aids in Rwanda, looking at which mothers have access to the appropriate healthcare equipment and why.

They used literature, expert interviews, and experiences, and through two workshops, organized the information into a cohesive and succinct description of the challenges of this research and why it is or may be happening.

Andrew Lakoff is a cultural anthropologist at University of Southern California. He studies social theory and medical anthropology.

Stephen Collier is a doctor of philosophy, derpartment of Anthropology, at the University of California Berkeley. He also studies social theory and social policy.

Both have studied policies on medical aid and global health.

Some othe rpublications:

"Vaccine Politics and the Management of Public Reason"

"Global Health Security and the Pathogenic Imaginary"

"Real-Time Biopolitics: The Actuary and the Sentinel in Global Public Health"

"Vital Systems Security: Reflexive Biopolitics and the Government of Emergency"

They could have discussed logistics on transport and mass treatments more, but overall they did a good job.