Analyze

In our group we had Dr. Jessica Sewell come speak to us a little while ago about her book Women and the Everyday City and we landed on the topic of “imaginaries of space” for a long time. And the visual politics of space- so how do we notice things? What do we notice? What seems out of place or in place. Thinking about how imaginaries make certain presences completely invisible (thinking here about gendered labor, black labor, and more). And how powerful imaginaries are, how they intersect with our construction of language. But also how resistance can work with these imaginaries.. thinking about women’s sort of take over of dept stores during the suffrage movement as an extension of their private space, a space for organizing. This is long winded way of trying to think through COVID-19 national models in the context of national imaginaries. What has been puzzling me is so many Americans’ response to the Swedish model of governing in Covid and how imaginaries of Sweden have been warped in such a way that there is a complete erasure of how xenophobic policies have gained traction in Sweden in recent years.  

An ethnographic moment that stands out to me is when a yearly visitor to the Grand Staircaise Escalante region emphasized the importance of preserving the area under monument status. In a rare moment of recognizing the energy use/demands of even those who are preservation/wilderness proponents, he said "look, I know we have to get our energy from somewhere and maybe for now it's going to be fossil fuels, but please, not here. This place is sacred." Although everyday energy use and the use of petroleum to make such outdoor recreation products as kayaks is occasionally brought into view instead of displaced, these comments are often divorsed from thinking about how people in this area get energy, where the materials extracted from this area go, and what other forms of energy production might replace this extraction. Rather than arguing for a transition of how energy is produced, there seems to be a sense of inevitabilty of extraction but a desire for such industrial processes to be carried out somewhere else.

The audience the film best addresses is the public who knew about the nuclear event, but were not informed to the extent of what had happened or its ramifications on the future.

This film is aimed at a more general audience as most of the science has been "dumbed down". It offers a more emotional portrayel as opposed to a scientific.

I feel that this film would be best suited for a general public, non-scholarly, audiance. While it provides great, compelling, emotional stories of first hand accounts of ebola, it does not look at the disaster from an objective, scholarly, perspective. 

The film addresses the general public, as it does not include significant amounts of scientific information that would require prior knowledge. The nature of the film however does aim toward a mature audience, as the film advises viewer discretion due to graphic images.

This film is directed towards the general public because of its emotional appeal. It does not have much dry, scientific data, which allows for a more general audience (as opposed to only those who are scientific). It is also targeted to an older population due to the graphic footage of the police shooting the children.

I would say the average community member is the main intended audience of this documentary, due to the fact that those in the general public can see themselves as being in the same situation. Most of those in the public aren't medically educated and the responses seen in Libera is the same that many of those would have in other general populations of other countries and locations. Due to the lack of scientific research and statistical analysis in the documentary, I would say that this documentary was meant to appeal to the general average person and not scientists, scholars or experts on the topic of disease containment. 

This film, I feel, best addresses those trying to understand the broader social impacts of a disease which can include government officials and policy makers, first responders, emergency personal and more.

I think it can both bring the public to better understand first response and disaster response better as well as serve as a great film for other first responders to better understand what happened and how that day was handled.