Analyze

I live in Glendale, CA. I completed by PhD at UCLA in the Graduate School of Education in 2020. I am interested in collaborative, visual, and experitmental research methods. My dissertation used youth participatory action research (YPAR) to examine children's health knowledge of the chronic illness and organ (heart) transplantation. I am interested in how COVID-19 impacts youth educational experiences and reinforces educational disparities. 

I can reached at ntanio[at]gmail[dot]com

I am especially interested in:

How are K-12 schools (primary and secondary schools) responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, what kind of support have they been given, what problems have emerged, and how are these problems being tracked and responded to?

How are universities responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, what kind of support have they been given, what problems have emerged, and how are these problems being tracked and responded to?

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.

I am a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. I am currently in (or around) Austin, Texas conducting fieldwork for my dissertation on the science and politics of transitioning to renewable energy resources in Austin, Texas. I have helped design and undertake geographically dispersed and collaborative PECE projects that have investigated toxic subjects and places, transnational sts, and quotidian anthropocenes. I can be reached by email at jradams1@uci.edu.

I am also a part of the Energy in COVID-19 Research Group that is a thematic subgroup of the larger Transnational STS COVID-19 Project. In this group we focus on how energy consumption, services, production, and futures have been impacted by the current pandemic.

The transnational STS COVID-19 project also intersects with my work at the level of city-scale questions pertaining to how COVID-19 related policies and practices are impacting and influencing strategies and processes of political engagement.  Accordingly, out of the project-wide analytic, I have been focusing on the following questions:

How is ‘social distancing’ practiced and interpreted in different COVID-19 settings?

How is the aftermath of COVID-19 crisis being imagined in different settings? How is this shaping beliefs, practices, and policies?

I teach anthropology and environmental studies at Haveford College, just outside of Philly. Currently, I'm holed up in a cabin in the Adirondacks in upstate New York with several family members, including my spouse and 4 year old daughter and 3 dogs. I started working on disasters by accident, when one day in 2001 I was walking to class at NYU and saw the World Trade Center buildings on flames. I have known Kim for a few year and I contacted her to connect with folks around Covid-19 and its imacts.

I'm particularly intersted in issues of communal grief, mourning, and bereavement. Also, I'm interested in the religious response to Covid-19.

Climate Leviathan is largely a critical discussion of various ways of envisioning and organizing the Macro level including sovereignty, the nation-state, capitalisms, geopolitics, the world system, geo-engineering, etc. However, by rooting the discussion in “the political,” besides the obvious recognition of carbon emissions (and a few others) as toxic, the primary toxin discussed in this text is all the way down at the Nano level of ideology. The main problem isn’t fossil fuels, our dependency on them, or the corruption of the politicians in their pockets, it is in our incapacity to recognize how the tools we resort to (capitalism and the nation-state) are fully incapable of addressing the problem at hand. Indeed, they argue that addressing climate change without a critical theory of both capitalism and the state “would be like trying to model hurricanes without a theory of thermodynamics or an understanding of the effects of changing ocean temperatures on cyclone dynamics” (2018, 66).

Their “cure” to ideology is a Gramscian strain of absolute historicism. Take for example their discussion of progress. They quote Gramsci:

“‘…progress has been a democratic ideology.’ … [However] Progress has lost its democratic aspect because ‘the official ‘standard bearers’ of progress’ (the bourgeoisie) have ‘brought into being in the present destructive forces like crises and unemployment, etc., every bit as dangerous and terrifying as those of the past,’ and it is clear that these forces are as much a result of ‘progress’ as technology and scientific knowledge.” (2018, 94).

In this discussion, progress transforms from ideological tonic to ideological toxin based upon its associated deployments within a new historical context. Under the rule of monarchy, the ideology of progress enabled the establishment of liberal democracies. But under liberal capitalism, this ideology underwrote the “production of a separation in the social world between the political and the rest and a consequent neutralizing onslaught on the political that attempts to proceduralize and depoliticize domination, that is, the continual production of freedom for some and unfreedom for others” (2018, 83). These facts notwithstanding, the authors do not recommend an outright denial of progress: “A blanket rejection of progress confuses the idea and its standard bearers, who are now in fact part of the ‘natural order’ in crisis” (2018, 95). The same goes for the current stand-in for the ideology of progress, adaptation: “adaptation is becoming the “progress” of our time. Adaptation is to the ideology of Climate Leviathan what progress was to bourgeois liberalism in the nineteenth century” (2018, 95). Which, once again, does not mean we are to get rid of the concept of adaptation “as if a revolutionary social movement for climate justice can somehow decide against adaptation. The question, rather, is how—how to reshape a conception of the political in a very hot world.” (2018, 95).

What this discussion suggests is that it is that toxicity, as it pertains to ideology and social structure, is not a simple binary relation. To argue this would amount to “blanket rejection” of the ideology of progress as toxic to democracy. Rather, the authors’ example demonstrates how toxicity entails a triadic relation to a relation. It is how the ideology of progress relates to the historically evolving relationship between the dominant and the dominated that determines whether or not the ideology of progress is toxic to democracy or not.

UPDATE April 30

Itty Abraham's article (2020) on The India Forum on "Four Future Scenarios". Professor Itty Abraham is a political scientist and STS scholar who works in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. Abraham talks about the "universal, uneven and endless" moment of COVID19 pandemic, positing four scenarios dominated by:

(1) pro-state progressive optimists: those who see this moment as end of neoliberalism and belief in the capacity of to learn. He gives Korea as an example of a successful public health system resulting from years of popular struggle that wore down authoritarian infrastructure. 

(2) end-of-globalization pessimists: those who believe international cooperation is at an end, the future of "relative international autarky". Gramsci's concept of the interregnum, a state of turmoil, bringing a new world polarity

(3) disaster capitalism pessimists: reinforcement of capitalism during crises exemplified by 9/11 and 2008 financial crisis. Relevant for US specially, close to "living with the bomb" scenarios of WWII. Lessons from the global anti-nuclear movement?

(4) techno-optimists: view this moment as latest challenge to human ingenuity, Whiggish reading of the past, learning from victories over diseases of the past. What lessons from HIV epidemic? 

Original Post April 17

Pedro's and James' responses to this question show the many ways in which thinking about the future post-COVID19 is resolutely tied to thinking about the crises of neoliberalism and sovereignty. They ask critical questions: How would political organization and mobilizing shift in response? Is it possible to imagine a "left-leaning" economics that is not nationalist? I want to respond to and build on these responses by asking one question: For whom is a non-neoliberal future possible?

I ask this question because I want to be attentive to people who have been thinking and practicing non-neoliberalism long before COVID showed how fragile neoliberalism of the global North is. I want to build on those who have long before realized how the logics of neoliberal capitalism were: (1) constituted in the global North through testing and experimenting elsewhere; (2) built on ongoing racial capitalism projects globally; (3) resisted in multiple ways globally. By asking this question, I want to build upon the work of scholars who have shown that neoliberalism was, and continues to be, a transnational project. And that the ways of resistance and organizing would therefore be transnational too. Is it possible to think about a future without stitching the past? In my response, I provide links to the works I have read before, or I am currently reading, that ask similar questions. 

When I hear and read about how COVID-19 has disrupted neoliberalism in an unprecedented way, I am reminded of the tendency to exceptionalize Trump, analysed in an exceptional way by Jonathan Rose and Yarimar Bonilla (2017), who point to a crisis of liberalism that the election of Trump brought upon many public intellectuals and scholars. They ask, "Has anthropology produced the kind of knowledge about the United States as a settler state that is required to understand the current moment?" Can we invoke an inclusive United States that never was? I am reminded of one of the CENHS podcasts I listened to, where Kyle Powys Whyte talked about "settler apocalypticism" in thinking about the Anthropocene and climate futures, in thinking about conceptions of time, morality and responsibility in times of crisis. His words will stay with me:  "What does it mean to think of an indigenous futurity when we don’t take today’s world for granted, but actually look at it as a apocalyptic and dystopian world?". Do we take today's world for granted when we think about how COVID has disrupted neoliberalism? For Whyte, the world at present is dystopic.

What vocabularies do we have to talk about crises when we live in a world that is a palimpsest of crises? I think we could look elsewhere, places that have been exceptionalized as places of ever-unfolding crises. Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nutall, in their article on "Writing the World from an African Metropolis" (2004), contemplate how to write about African cities in a way that doesn't portray them as failed projects of incomplete modernity arising out of colonial European encounters. When we talk about African cities, they ask, why is it that we are left with images of decay and breakdown on one hand, and survival and velocity against all odds on the other? Why are we left with images of weakened or ineffectual state, even in scholarly conversations? These questions are important because precisely these images were used as justifications for testing and experimenting neoliberal policies in the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s-present, which would replace a weak and inefficient state in the global South.

I point to Mbembe and Nutall's line of questioning also because they recognise that crisis-thinking is epistemological, it points to the "limits to the capacity of epistemological imagination, to pose questions about what we know and where we know that from”. How do we talk about African cities like we talk about other cities? They argue that the first step would be to recognize that African cities are already fully located, and have been, even before trans-Atlantic trades, in global circuits of finance, labor, and capital. This does not mean that we don't talk about failure, but that failure is not exceptionalized in a way that feeds Africa's representation as "intractable, mute, abject, other-worldly”. The challenge is to think with subjects and places that cannot be easily located. This bibliography on how migration/borders is intersecting with COVID-19 is one example where we would need vocabularies that neither exceptionalize nor provincialse. 

The question of political organizing and mobilizing in times of crisis therefore needs to build on movements and organizing that have resulted out of long histories of exclusion. How does movement-building look like from those who have learned to organize in a state that was to them mostly oppressive and withdrawn? Corinna Mullin and Azadeh Shahshahani (2020) reflect on what a transnational perspective on movement-building and organizing looks like. Their excellent article points to early Black radical internationalism and organizations, indigenous internationalism, the international peasant and ecological movement of Via Campesina, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, Black for Palestine and The Red Nation movements, for example. In short, we have much to learn from responses by ongoing anti-imperialist movements during COVID-19 which have called for cancellation of neocolonial debt, land repatriation, reconfiguration of gig and hustle economies, just to give a few examples. 

In thinking about future and learning, I also found reading Guilberly Louissaint's (2020) article “Hygiene” is the Future: Lessons from “Post”-Cholera Haiti quite refreshing. Reflecting on the aftermath of COVID-19 responses, he notes: "the haunting of the COVID-19 epidemic will remain, not just in the memories of the things and ones that have been lost, but also in a haunted public. Governments will be consumed by the constant effort to manage our new enemy by implementing rigid, authoritarian policies, in which hygiene predominates and the invisible world becomes a target... I depart with the wisdom of Clyde Woods’ “Haiti is the Future.” It is poetic to think that worlds that were seen with no future, but ruins have lived the current reality of COVID-19 time and time again."

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 am situated in Albuquerque, New Mexico in the U.S. Southwest. I have a background conducting multi-locale ethnographic research on the politics of cleaning up uranium mine waste and mill tailings in northwestern New Mexico. I am now concerned about how abandoned mine lands (AMLs) and other decaying toxic infrastructures of settler colonial extraction and development compound environmental health risks and impacts in Native American communities. How has COVID-19 unfolded in the Navajo Nation (Dinétah)? What pre-existing environmetnal health vulnerabilities have exacerbated the impact of COVID-19? How can we forge culturally appropriate pathways of resilience in response to the initial impact of the pandemic?

Context: Currently, I´m based in Bogota, Colombia´s capital city of 8 million people. At the beginning of March, the government informed about the first COVID-19 case in the country, a young woman who came back from a trip to Italy. The 19th, with less than 30 confirmed cases, Bogota declared a provisional and pedagogical quarantine for a weekend. Around a dozen of cities followed Bogota´s initiative, living with few choices the central government to take a different approach. On March 23 the President declared national state of emergency, and extending a national quarantine, with few exceptions (medical staff, public servants, police and military forces, inner city transportation, among others). After a month under quarantine we have witnessed a strong support to the central government, a national coordination approach few times seen in the country. Political opposition forces and the Congress have been behind the scenes. News networks have displayed an enourmous time to medical, epidemiological, health and scientific experts. President and local leaders speak to the public nearby or citing experts from top scientific institutions. Epidemiological models are shaping decisions about when to go out, who can go out, and how normal life can be retake.

Analytical approach: I am analyzing how COVID-19 governance is taking place in Colombia, through the participation of scientific experts. I am concerned about how scientific data and information are displayed and communicated, focusing on health and epidemiological issues. I am interested in foolowing how other researchers analyze data platforms, transparency issues, and the articulation between health safety and inequality and economic impact.

Contact: awx1111@gmail.com