Analyze

One smaller project, which I think is manageable for the upcoming PECE party, is to trace the history of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) police department known as the Los Angeles School Police Dept. (LASPD) through a timeline project. There have been growing attempts to defund the LASPD in favor of programs that focus on student's physical and mental health. These efforts have failed thus far, yet it is an issue that continue to come before school board meetings.

Energy in COVID-19 has started a collection of artifacts housed in our Timeline Essay. We also have our Research Briefs, where we discuss these artifacts in two-week cycles. Our group also hosts energy reading group discussions, the latest of which was Dana Powell's, Landscapes of Power. We are also currently developing a review of literature at the intersection of energy and disaster. We welcome collaborators.

I’ll work with Tim Schütz to build a Zotero bibliography and digital collection of research, news and commentary focused on connections between COVID-19 and environmental injustice -- for use in fall teaching (in a lower division undergraduate class, “Environmental Injustice”).  This will support the COVID Community Case Study Assignment in the COVID-19 Ethnographic Portfolio Project.  

I’ll also work with Tim to build a digital collection focused on COVID-19 in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana (USA), a COVID-19 and environmental injustice hotspot. This collection will contribute to our set of place essays.   It also will be part of  a digital tour of St. John the Baptist Parish that we are designing for students, collaborating with the Whitney Plantation, a rare (if not singular) plantation museum focused on and honoring the lives of enslaved people.  The chemical plants in St. John the Baptist Parish were built on the foundation of sugar plantations.  We hope to build a powerful case demonstrating both compound vulnerabilities and ways racism and injustice are historically produced.