Analyze

Perhaps this eating habit is not a special case. You can ask different families if they have similarities or differences.

I am particularly interested in comparative approaches on how different sites (and academics in those places or studying them) are thinking about COVID in their localities. How are people dealing with issues of trust and information in an era when entire archives are in danger (like the police archives in Guatemala which had been rescued in the past decade and are now in danger). This question expands beyond COVID but has become crucial in the context of Ecuador where reliable data is hard to come by. Another important aspect for us is how indigenous communities are fairing amid the pandemic (here a fabulous article on the terrible situation in Brazil—which is not so different to Ecuador's). This touches on issues of communication, infrastructure, language, systemic racism, and more. Finally, I am also interested in ways in which we might be a able to contribute to some of these issues from our academic spaces. Collaborators (which can take many forms) are certainly welcomed.

I'm a co-founder of Kaleidos - Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography, a space for academic experimentations supported by two top ranked universities in Ecuador (University of Cuenca and FLACSO-Ecuador). We are located in Cuenca, where I am assistant professor of medical anthropology. Together with a team of researchers we have been tracking covid19 with a specific focus on Latin America through Spanish language podcasts, collective texts, webinars, and online forums.

My current ethnographic interest is on documenting data distrust networks from the neighborhood scale to the national level in Ecuador, and how these networks have produced distinctive approaches (and failures) to the current pandemic.

I was interested in learning about how air pollution has been talked/researched in the New Orleans area. Mainly, the need to highlight local specificities and historical analysis. A 1950s study on air pollution in New Orleans (Air Pollution and New Orleans Asthma), for instance, documented asthma incidence among black communities (sadly the article still uses the N word), and its relationship to underground fire burning in nearby dumps. The study is more comprehensive and did a census in part of the city as well as a number of medical tests on 84 individuals.

A second study, this one from 2007, documented asthma in children (Prevalence of Indoor Allergen Exposures among New Orleans Children with Asthma). It has a relevant focus of the differences between document indoor allergen exposure in different areas of the US and how subtropical weather in NOLA plays an important role in the kinds of allergies that children with asthma face. One of the main findings of the study can be summarized in the following quote “our data show that asthmatic children in New Orleans may be exposed to a greater number of allergens at moderate to high levels compared to asthmatic children living in other inner cities and to the general population.”

Finally, a third reference, the book Race, Place, and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina: Struggles to Reclaim, Rebuild, and Revitalize New Orleans and the Gulf Coast talks about something, others have already pointed out (@Omar Perez Figueroa for instance) regarding areas that undergo dramatic change and hardship after natural disasters like hurricane Katrina and Rita. This book, particularly chapter 5 (though I can’t access the full text) explains the highly toxic environment that resulted (and remains) in the New Orleans area due to little clean-up action following the disasters. Lack of funding, deference to poorly resourced local authorities, and policy-failure all affect New Orleans (and many of our sites of research) particularly the fate of vulnerable communities.

This article didn't really have anything related to emergency response in it;however, I did look at how initial treatment following an exposure to HIV can decrease your chances of it taking hold in your body.

This article discusses how organizations can respond to and mitigate the effects of public health disasters. They discuss different responses to past crises and how past crises are different than those that have been presenting themselves in the modern era.

This article discusses several disasters that resulted in major loss of human life in the US; it examines the similarities and differences between them, and how they've evolved through the years. The first disaster that was discussed was the burning of the US Capitol Building in 1814. The article then moves on to discuss the Hague Street boiler explosion and building collapse in New York in 1850, the Iroquois Theater FIre in Chicago in 1903, and finally, the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. This article points out that in the first two investigations, there was a lot of finger pointing that took place when the government (both federal and local) and private individuals investigated the aftermath. Moving into investigating the more recent two incidents, individuals and organizations may have finger-pointed, but they also conducted thorough investigations that resulted in recommendations for change to save life and property in the future.

Dider Fassin is a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey. As a physician, he is an expert in internal medicine and public health. He also has studied mortality disparities and is said to have developed the field of critical moral anthropology. Dr. Fassin doesn't appear to be professionally situated with respect to emergency response. He currently studies "punishment, asylum, inequality, and the politics of life," all of which are abstracted greatly from emergency response. He has published a book entitled The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry Into the Condition of Victimhood, which may be of interest of the DSTS Network. 

By examining the bibliography, it appears that this report was produced after the author conducted a great deal of research including interviewing other experts in the field and reading many other texts on the subject. One could also gather that the author examined publications by agencies relevant to the topic such as theIAEA and the US NRC.