Advocacy organizations in Taiwan have formed a coalition to monitor the activities of Taiwanese Multinational Corporations. This involves sharing strategies between campaigns, including workplace accidents at the Formosa Steel plant in Vietnam and toxic exposures at Samsung (see SHARPS and Kim et al 2021).
In her article, Scharenberg (2023) provides methodological reflections on politically engaged or militant social science research. In one section, she discusses the challenge that social movements act as knowledge producers in their own right, often working independent from or outside of academic institutions (2023, 15). This raises questions about what social scientiss add to the mix. I've had similar questions working with and alongside activists in the global anti-plastics movement. Building on Casa-Cortes, Osterweil, and Powell (2013), Scharenberg points out that one response for scholars is to act as "editors" or "curators" of collective knowledge. This argument resonates with the way that I and other collaborators have thought about the engaged ethnographic archive projects:
Activist ethnographers thus become editors of collective knowledges rather than the sole producers of scientific theory. Like a literary editor, the ethnographer works from a position, which does not create knowledges from scratch, but collects the perspectives of others and assembles them with reference to the given context. In this view, objectivity might be achieved, to borrow an expression from Haraway, by assembling “partial views and halting voices” into what she calls a “collective subject position” (1988: 590). Alternatively, we might think of the editor-ethnographer as Berger’s “clerk of the records” (Scheper-Hughes, 1995: 419) who compiles the history of a group of people. Scheper-Hughes understands this position as a kind of witness. (Scharenberg 2023, 16).
From discussions of how to best document virtual strikers, organizers concluded participants should submit images of themselves holding signs of their commitment to fasting for a day with Diane Wilson. The series of images, showing many people from different countries, could create a sense of solidarity despite physical distance. In addition, images can serve as a tool against FPG demonstrating that many people disapprove of the corporation's actions, despite not being present at the in-person rally. Can images, however, form the same level of solidarity or connection that an in-person interaction otherwise would?
During my thesis project, Tim has served as a collaborator and mentor while he studied data use among activists opposing Formosa Plastics Group (FPG). In addition to connecting me with activists and interview candidates, he also introduced me to a small network of American and Taiwanese students in Taiwan and the United States studying FPG. This community can share resources and knowledge to further our individual studies. Could this academic network serve as a parallel to the transnational activist alliances I am studying? Are the strengths and barriers of research alliances reminiscent of the strengths and barriers of activist alliances?
The authors recognize and relate the critique of the Anthropocene to their critique of both capitalism and sovereignty. “One way or another, however reluctantly, the logic of capital in the Anthropocene points toward planetary sovereignty.” (2018, 122). Later on they remark that “the Anthropocene, the era that now puts all humans on the same geological age” ignores the fact that the “world’s peoples live in a multitude of geo-ecological times despite our planetary ‘simultaneity,’ and the forces that have helped shape those worlds are not reducible to ‘humanity’ in general, but to particular natural-historical social formations.” (2018, 174).
Crucially, however, Mann and Wainwright do not disagree with the other central claim embedded in the concept of the Anthropocene, the appreciation of social impacts on what are otherwise considered natural or “non-human” systems. Indeed, they pull in Gramsci’s problematization of social and natural history to argue that “‘nature’ and ‘society’ are inseparable, active relations. And these relations are themselves inextricable from the processes through which we forge critical conceptions of the world” (2018, 91).
This picture of the Anthropocene closely aligns with perspective outlined by Elinoff and Vaughan in their discussion of Quotidian Anthropocenes (forthcoming), and reinforces both the analytic and political purchase of ethnographic investigations into the unique cultural and political struggles to respond to the particular configurations of anthropocenics that characterize discrete locales. Such investigations not only problematize top-down or one-size-fits-all policies of climate protection or adaptation, but they also appreciate the potential for keen political insight to develop “organically” (in Gramsci’s sense of the term) in the social formations springing up around local issues.
And, while recognizing a potential disciplinary bias, I believe these insights point to method for answering one of Mann and Wainwright’s questions: “A key question, then, is what the focus of a critical reconstruction of our conception of the world should be. What are the essential common senses we must undo to see the future for which we must struggle?” The focus that I would propose entails ethnographic engagements with place, but ones that are both and simultaneously multi-sited and multi-sighted (Marcus 1995).
Wainwright and Mann are astute macro-political theorists but they seem less reflexive and critical of the way in which they scale their politics.
What is obviously necessary is a means of governance that is not beholden to modern state sovereignty, at the same time that this necessity is denied by some of those very sovereign states. … The scale of the problems is so great, it seems impossible to confront them without the state, but it seems just as impossible that the state as currently constituted is going to get the job done. We face a situation in which there is, under current geopolitical and geoeconomic arrangements, no right answer” (2018, 119-120).
The experimental promise of Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Marcus and Fischer 1986) lay in the innovative solutions that were being generated in response to the problem of keeping the world system of political economy in the same analytical frame as the cultural and symbolic systems that were unique to the researcher’s object of study (see also Fortun 2003, 2009). In sum, multi-sited fieldwork, enabled through complex objects of study and creative research designs, presents the opportunity to perturb our commonsense politics of scale. And, at another level, collaborations across research projects enables further appreciation of “how to reshape a conception of the political in a very hot [polluted, disease-ridden, etc.] world” (Wainwright and Mann 2018, 95).
The reference section of this article tells us about the type and number of sources that information from this article was drawn from. This article's research was drawn from a mix of online and print sources, consisting of international policy, agency reports, previous peer reviewed research articles, and news reports.
The bibliography suggests this article was produced through analysis of historical events and other works without any new experimentation or data collection.
The article was produced using research that was current to the topic at hand, but at the same time using research that provides why attempts at getting a response team was trying and the attempts made in the past 15+ years, supporting articles to why the argument is correct. The article was produced in response to the lack of preperation at nuclear events.
The author uses a wide variety of news and journal sources to make their point. Everything from the New York Times to East Asian Science. It also cites many volumes on disaster preparedness. For example, “The Chernobyl Accident: a Case Study in International Law Regulation State Responsibility for Transboundary”. The sources tell me that the article was developed around the news at the time and works that dealt with handling of disasters from the past. For me, this furthers the case that the author is making: that the way we have been doing things in the past is not working.
The author uses a wide variety of news and journal sources to make their point. Everything from the New York Times to East Asian Science. It also cites many volumes on disaster preparedness. For example, “The Chernobyl Accident: a Case Study in International Law Regulation State Responsibility for Transboundary”. The sources tell me that the article was developed around the news at the time and works that dealt with handling of disasters from the past. For me, this furthers the case that the author is making: that the way we have been doing things in the past is not working.