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Ina Kim

Ina

I am a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. I am working on my doctoral dissertation that explores post-disaster ecological imaginary shaped and performed through data practices in post-Fukushima Japan. My project examines how data practices of citizen radiation detection activities construct and reconfigure the understanding and experience of citizen scientists regarding post-Fukushima “Japan” as part of the ecosystem.  For further projects, I am also interested in the sociocultural role of small data in the era of big data and how small data that represent and intervene in environmental issues are intersected and interacted with big data in various domains. 

I am currently participating in the Transnational Disaster STS COVID-19 project and the COVID-19 and Data group as a subgroup of the project above. As a member of these groups, I am unraveling COVID-19 data practices and the relationships among multiple data actors such as the government, research institutions, media, and citizen scientists in Japan. I am also interested in how differently citizen data platforms have been gaining scientific and political authorities in Japan, the U.S., and South Korea during the pandemic.

I am particularly interested in these questions: 

  • What do different disciplines and communities involved in COVID-19 response mean by “good data”?

  • How do local, national, and global data intersect, interact, and compete with each other? 

  • What is shown and what is revealed or disregarded in COVID-19 data produced about different settings (a particular city, region, or country, for example)?

  • How are COVID-19 GIS data integrated with other data forms? What is the role of the GIS data in different COVID-19 settings?

  • What is the role of civic data as COVID-19 information in comparison to governmental or institutional data?

  • What do people expect from data within the COVID-19 pandemic? 

  • How is the data circulated for COVID-19 different from data produced in another pandemic period?

I can be contacted at inahk[at]uci.edu.

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joerene.aviles

The main point of the article was that despite $13.5 billion in monetary dontions to Haiti, the country is not much better than before the earthquake. The article notes Haiti's ongoing political turmoil, a cholera epidemic (which the U.N. is underfunding and not taking credit for causing), and the system which stifles foreign aid to Haiti as factors for the lack of actual improvements to Haiti even with the large amount of donations they received. 

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joerene.aviles

The article uses statistics from FEMA, other government studies, interviews with New Orleans residents, and other research articles about post-Katrina New Orleans. Some of the data mentioned were percentages of residents that returned to New Orleans, number of residents recieving mail, and average home loan/ assitance amounts given. 

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joerene.aviles

The main findings in this article is the phenomenon of "biological citizenship" that occurred in the Ukraine after the Chernobyl disaster, how "scientific cooperation and political management" developed, and how sociopolitical factors affect the course of health and disease in a country. 

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joerene.aviles

The parts of the film that I found most persuasive and compelling were Atul Gawande's personal experience. As both a surgeon and son, he has the unique viewpoint of being the one to be the bearer of bad news and be the one to accept his father's mortality as his cancer progressed. Gawande gives rational and emotional parts of end-of-life care, and is able to learn new ways of handling mortality as a healthcare provider and a human. 

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joerene.aviles

Bruze Nizeye and Sara Stulac both work with Partners in Health (founded by Paul Farmer) while Salmaan Keshavjee is a physician and researcher whose expertise is in multi-drug resistant tuberculosis and global health. Farmer's and Keshavjee's anthropological research in particular is important to emergency response because it would allow for improved preparation of treatment to those communities. Their work in seeing the social causes of health epidemics would also allow for better prevention of disasters. 

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joerene.aviles

1. Multi-drug resistant HIV and impact to treatments and research

2. Rudolph Virchow and his work in public health

3. "In the two rural districts of Rwanda in which the PIH model was introduced in May 2005, an estimated 60 percent of inhabitants are refugees, returning exiles, or recent settlers; not a single physician was present to serve 350,000 people." -looked up how this came to be; was there any healthcare available to them at all?