Following the article, the author J. Kenens has published another paper "Changing perspectives: tracing the evolution of citizen radiation measuring organizations after Fukushima (2020)" DOI: 10.1051/radiopro/2020041 (link) that draws on the research on citizen science in Japan with a new focus on the comparison of their practices directly after the nuclear accident and today.
It is interesting to see how citizen science in Japan is enacted and how the concept of citizen science is dependent to the social and cultural context. Also looking at it not only from a top-down perspective, where universities or organizations are involved, but also the bottom-up perspective that includes only those practices that are done by citizens alone opens up a new space. As I am currently engaging with research on air pollution in different sites, I could build from this text in considering the link between "citizen-driven approaches and institutional imparatives in the governance" (p. 7) of issues with air pollution.
The text is an article about citizen science in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster in 2011. The first noteworthy detail about this text that struck me is the inclusion of Japanese words and even their original spelling. This creates a kind of closeness to the field that the authors did their research in.
The authors engaged in multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork that took place in and around Fukushima but also in other geografical sites like Tochigi, Miyagi, Aichi, Tokyo and Kyoto. There, they conduct semi-structured interviews with various organisations that are all somehow involved with citizen science or radiation measurement. To learn about the citizens that measure radioactivity and create their own data on radiation because of a lack of provided data by the government, a literature review of policy documents and workshops with those citizen scientists is performed.
This policy applies internationally, to 119 states who were subject to it after the entry to force date. 69 states signed the convention at the IAEA special meeting in 1986.
This article finds that based on the culture an individual belongs to, with its special beliefs, stigmas, and customs, how a patient may describe the "narrative" of an illness can vary greatly. A connection is shown to exist between the physical impact of an illness on the individual, how the illness is percieved by their culture, and the way they will describe the illness and seek treatment for it.
Some additional points to research to forward understanding of emergency response would be:
-Structural Violance
-Societal factors influencing public health
-nationalized health insurance.
Three ways the arguements of this article are supported are:
I feel that this film would be best suited for a general public, non-scholarly, audiance. While it provides great, compelling, emotional stories of first hand accounts of ebola, it does not look at the disaster from an objective, scholarly, perspective.