Search

By Scott G. Knowles: As part of the STL Anthropocene Field Campus the research team visited the Wood Refinery Refinery History Museum on March 9, 2019. This museum is located on the grounds of the Wood River Refinery, a Shell Oil refinery built in 1917 and today owned by Phillips 66. The site is Roxana, Illinois, just upriver from Granite City, and just over two miles from the convergence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Sitting on the actual grounds of the refinery, the museum is an invitation to think across the micro, meso, and macro scales of the Quotidian Anthropocene, in terms of geography and also in terms of time. This refinery was built at the crux of the WWI, at a time when United States petrochemical production was entering an intensive phase of production, invention, corporate structuring, and global engagement. The museum is an invitation to think across temporal scales, backwards to the start of the refinery--through the individual lives of the workers and engineers whose lives defined the refinery--and forward to indeterminate points of future memory. This photo captures a key moment in an informal interview we did with one of the history guides. He had worked in the museum for decades before retiring. He explained to us that the museum sits in the former research facility of the refinery--and the glass plat he is showing reveals a beautiful artifact, a photograph made of the complex when it was built. Our guide only showed us this collection of slides after our conversation had advanced, perhaps after he was sure we were truly interested in his story, and the deeper history of the refinery. The pride in the place, the community of workers, and the teaching ability of the museum was manifest. The research team felt impressed, but also concerned about the health impacts (and naturally the environmental impacts as well) of the refinery. There was a mismatch in the scales--the memory of the individual tied to emotions of pride and knowledge of hard work done there--and the Anthropocene, global scale of petrochemicals. How do we resolve this mismatch? The glass plate is somehow a clue.

So much has happened in Kenya in the last months. Police brutality has skyrocketed and has reached an all time high.  (Watch this video documentary and read this article).

The government has come under fire for their poor response to the crisis. The leader of the opposition: Raila Odinga has launched a new 'coronavirus certificate', which has come under heavy criticism. Some believe that obtaining this certificate could be a barrier to access to jobs. A person could get infected after being tested etc.

There have been other stories such as the President and the Chief Justice  battling on Twitter (Link), the internal politics of the Nairobi County government re budget allocation and conflicts about leadership (Link). The detainment of workers who've come back to Kenya in quarantine centers (Link) etc.

All of these stories need to be told. But journalist and writer Nanjala Nyabola reminds us: what are the stories that are not being given airtime, and will not be part of the Kenyan archive and imagination (Link)? Stories such as the amazing protest art in Nairobi (Link), or the way communities have come together during this time, or the work that the Mathare Social Justice Center has been doing to fight police violence (Link). There is a need to amplify, tell and retell these stories too.

So the main 'slowdown' of the economy as well as the 'lockdown' of people appears to come to an end. It's been three exceptional months, as for instance emphasized by altered mobility patterns. (See https://www.covid-19-mobility.org/current-mobility/) However, what do we make out of this?

I would like to propose the following argument: The global health crisis of SARS-CoV-2 triggered a new public engagement with the polluted world produced and inhabited by humans. Media reports and preliminary scientific studies showed how pollution parameters decreased significantly and people visited public parks to a previously unknown extent. A debate on healthy clean air popped up, which was further strengthened by measures to contain the pandemic. Publicly discussed scientific studies suggest a correlation between COVID vulnerability and air pollution; and through hygiene measures, the mask has become popular as an object of protection, which in many societies was previously known primarily as protection against air pollution in public spaces. A few authors even claimed that air pollution should be indentified as a pandemic as well, a non-communicable pandemic with a significant toll.

We know perfectly well that air pollution is a slow disaster that is hard to account for. Threshold limits are not enough. The unequal consequences are not well appreciated, let alone translated into sufficient action. The pandemic experiences might help cherish clean air; it could help in producing clean and healthy air as a common good.

This is just a start, but I'm thinking about doing more research on that topic. One possible approach would be to discuss the "clean air experience" cross-culturally (like we do during the calls), while analysing and drawing on public (social media/media) discussions to enact clean air as a value. In turn, this could help bring pollution prevention and accountability to the forefront.

Guidelines and Contingency planning for 2020-2021 School year:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-08/new-guidelines-say-school-year-will-see-some-california-students-learning-from-home
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/teacher-health-fall-schools-coronavirus/2020/06/05/12bf261a-99f9-11ea-ac72-3841fcc9b35f_story.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/06/04/fauci-whole-bunch-things-can-be-done-reopen-schools/

https://edsource.org/2020/classes-outside-face-coverings-and-one-way-hallways-how-los-angeles-schools-may-reopen/632399
https://www.npr.org/2020/05/26/858257200/the-pandemic-is-driving-americas-schools-toward-a-financial-meltdown
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/05/26/future-public-education-is-stake-an-open-letter-joe-biden-215-school-advocates/



Graduation: 

from NYT times on how to celebrate your HS graduation: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/style/self-care/graduation-celebration-pandemic.html


Remote Learning & Student Achievement

https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/education/education-interruptions-student-achievement/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/us/coronavirus-education-lost-learning.html

students with disabilities: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-25/coronavirus-school-special-education





In news reports from New York Times, to Los Angeles Times, to Navajo Times, as Indigenous nations of the United States respond to the impacts of the “Novel Coronavirus 2019” (COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2), they are calling out the re-emergence of an old, long-standing problem. During a recent interview, Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez said, “We are United States citizens but we’re not treated like that. You can hear the frustration, the tone of my voice. We, once again, have been forgotten by our own government” (NPR “Morning Edition,” April 24, 2020).

In this blind spot of the federal government, and despite the ignorance of the current administration, national news coverage has made the Navajo Nation (Dinétah) an “epicenter” in the popular imaginary of the so-called “Native impact” of COVID-19, which refers to the disproportionate rates of infection and compounding vulnerabilities in Indigenous nations across the United States. As the most populous “American Indian Tribe” in the US with approximately 325,000 people who identify as Diné, a broad range of news outlets found it fitting to compare the per-capita infection rates of COVID-19 in the Navajo Nation with U.S. states, ranking it the third highest behind New Jersey and New York. In the absence of the federal government, state governors and departments have also begun to grapple with the numbers. New Mexico Department of Health (NMDOH) calculates the disparity of the “Native impact” in their public release of the state’s new COVID-19 data portal through a “Statewide Race/Ethnicity Breakdown” of the 3,513 recorded cases of infections in New Mexico: 53.41% “American Indian/Alaska Native”; 19.81% “Hispanic/Latino”; 15.81% “White” (accessed May 2, 2020).

From local to global news coverage of the coronavirus, one of the first questions asked about the impacts of the pandemic in particular places is: “What are the numbers?” The numbers prompt a pathological analysis, both biomedical and sociological. Although the biomedical pathology may be warranted, social pathology and discourse that pathologizes “culture” remain risky. This reportage on “the numbers” is part of the process Audra Simpson calls “the analytics of ‘minoritization,’ a statistical model for the apprehension of (now) racialized populations ‘within’ nation-states” (as cited in 2014:18; see 2011:211). It is part of the same state calculus in the etymology of the word “statistic” that was used historically to apprehend Diné people, capturing them categorically and spatially. In this collection of annotations, the numbers open up a different kind of analysis that leverages the concept of “minoritization” to turn a static category into an active and lively process of emergence and change, and account for the processes that attempt to make “minorities.”

In order to understand the impacts of and responses to the pandemic, the compound vulnerabilities, responsibility and resilience, we need to shift our gaze from a statistical and pathological view of the impact in the Navajo Nation to broader inter- and extra-governmental relations and infrastructures. Four relations of governance across geographic and institutional scales seem important to me: (1) U.S. federal government’s responsibility in recognizing and realizing the rights of Indigenous nations as stipulated in United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, as well as state and federal treaties and contracts; (2) how neighboring state government of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah support or inhibit the public health governance capacity of the Navajo Nation; (3) the implications of decisions made by neighboring counties and municipalities; and (4) “nongovernment” political action, community and grassroots organizing.

By broadening the analysis across scales and developing deeper understanding at each level, this collection of annotations will demonstrate the responsibility of the U.S. federal government for how COVID-19 is unfolding in the Navajo Nation. In what follows, I will identify specific strategies of the “politics of time” (Kirsch 2014) and the “lateness” of late industrialism (Fortun 2014) that inhere in the settler colonial “logic of elimination” of Indigenous peoples (Wolfe 2006), as enacted by the U.S. federal government, and indexed by compounding environmental health vulnerabilities. By shifting the ethnographic gaze from the long history of pathological studies of Diné people, and Indigenous peoples across the U.S., to the external forces compounding on the Navajo Nation, we will be able to see the dominant formation of energy geopolitics that is almost a century old. Power lines are the obvious indicators, as Andrew Needham points out, which are a seemingly banal infrastructure that connects the Navajo Nation to Phoenix, Arizona and other cities in the U.S. Southwest as they contour the uneven gradients of energy and political power, and trace the dualistic process of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2004). My central argument follows Dana Powell’s notion that, in the Navajo Nation, “energy is politics”—that is, “energy itself is at the heart of the Navajo Nation’s political existence,” and it is of broader cosmopolitical significance in Dinétah (Powell 2018:29; original emphasis).

What we will notice in the emergency public health response of the federal government, and the Trump administration in particular, is a double-vision for the Navajo Nation. As the pandemic rapidly unfolded, the environmental and public health of Diné people—what Powell refers to as “the true body politic”—was put at risk, rendered invisible, forgotten and ignored, or as Eryn Wise articulates, “treated as sacrifice zones for the pandemic,” echoing the discourse surrounding a legacy of “radioactive nation building” (Masco 2006). As Indigenous peoples and public health disappeared as a priority from the purview of the feds, the energy resources of the region simultaneously became a geopolitical target of intensive extraction. Reading between these two lines of forgetting Indigenous health and rendering energy resources legible for extraction offers unique insight into the governance style of the current administration; it also reveals the toxic infrastructures that shape pre-existing environmental health conditions (e.g., coal mines and power plants, abandoned uranium mines and mill tailings sites, and national “sacrifice zones” from Cold War nuclear weapons manufacturing and experimenting).

During the most urgent moments of the pandemic, the federal government was actively engaged in the promotion of resource extraction in the region, from uranium to oil and gas. The Navajo Nation is a place that temporarily disappeared from the purview of the federal government as a national health crisis, in a region that simultaneously became the focus of federal support for uranium mining. This cluster of annotations will highlight the double vision for the Navajo Nation that has emerged in the wake of the pandemic: The first step was the ignorance and refusal of the federal government to recognize and fulfill their responsibility to support Indigenous nations of the United States in a timely manner. In this case, timing was key.

This annotation responds to the question of migration of Covid-19 knowledge as social critique across borders. In this "quick response" post, originally published in early March, philosopher Frédéric Neyrat outlines different forms of separatism in response to the virus.

original French: https://www.terrestres.org/2020/03/05/virus-et-separation/

eng translation https://territories.substack.com/p/viruses-and-separation

Neyrat begins with an analysis of the French context beginning with President Macron's strategic decision to move from a logic of the commons to a logic of separatism in criticizing French-Muslim activists. Neyrat characterizes this as political separatism: separating the State from its people in order to protect the State. Macron's position co-incides with the emergence of a different form of separatism linked to the pandemic. Neyrat describes this as biopolitical separatism, the phenomena of governments asking individuals to separate themselves in order to protect themselves and prevent the spread of Covid-19. 

Neyrat then moves then to characterize the novel coronavirus as an expression of globalization and the anthropocene. Covid-19 emerges within strategies to erase separation by building global networks of trade. This analysis of quarantine or social-distancing within an overarching effort to build global infrastructure thereby overcome separation is the strength of the short piece.  In effect, individuals are asked to stay separated within inseparable conditions.

Neyrat concludes by trying to distinguish between different forms of separatism. What kinds of separations do "we" want to produce and what kinds of separations do "we" want to overcome—I am thinking here of Duygu Kasdogan discussion of the complexity of "freedom." What does scholarly freedom mean? How does it intersect with the protestors in the US who argue that social distancing policies are an infringment on personal freedom?

Neyrat raises the possibility of a "Great Refusal," (citing Marcuse, Blanchot) as an open signifier that may produce "a political virality that does not consent to the world order."  The text ends by suggesting that a re-imagining of separation, as a contestation of taken-for-granted conditions of the thermo-industrial capitalism, might be possible.

A radio interview with Neyrat (beginning ~29:26) for WFBH's Interchange is linked here

First: Another list on another google doc and just looking at it https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1UTQvW_OytC37IatMNR5qJK7qKfSylNpI2fT3pdteVZA/mobilebasic gets me started: we're all barely keeping up and just trying to direct the firehose into some readily available container like a google doc because we can't drink any more and it's the easiest thing to hand.  I'm happy with the dangerous "we": all we humanists and all them scientists are trying to do kaelidoscopics at speed, saving the excess for future analysis while trying to do the analysis right now and get something in print right now which is aleready too late.  "They" have better containers (infrastructure) and that matters, but I think it's important to note the shared space of urgency and excess and ask about the effects these have on analysis, ours and theirs and: ours.

It has to be hurried, the only take worth anything these days is the hot take, for scientists, science journalists, science analysts. An exaggeration, but I'm rushed. We know that air pollution (two words harboring such complexity and excess on its own: PM2.5, ozone, NOX, etc.etc.) impacts health in numerous ways, in and beyond our repiratory system; we know that those physiological logics are compounded by cultural logics, in their complexity and excess: race poverty geolocation healthcare access nutritional needs etc. etc. A kaleidoscopic intersectional analysis that, to get good reliable outcomes, takes time.

A need for generosity.

So as I make my way down the list in the google doc and read that some group or some lab shows the COVID-19 intersects with air pollution and makes for worse outcomes for African Americans I'm predisposed toward belief, for many good reasons, compounded by the rush. And the data and the correlations between, say, increased mortality in areas of northern Italy where there are higher levels of airpollution is certainly believable, compelling -- for NO2 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720321215?via%3Dihub

and air pollution generally

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749120320601

That kind of crunching of large data sets seems believable -- and has been stamped as peer reviewed. So what do we do with this article in The Conversation

https://theconversation.com/air-pollution-covid-19-and-death-the-perils-of-bypassing-peer-review-136376

critical of a Harvard School of Public Health study available as a preprint on medrxiv --

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.05.20054502v2

-- that concludes that "an increase of only 1 μg/m3 in PM2.5 is associated with an 8% increase in the COVID-19 death rate (95% confidence interval [CI]: 2%, 15%)"?  The Canadian researchers in The Conversation are not convinced:

"It is almost impossible to try to adjust for the influence of all these factors, as this study tried to do, because the interactions between these variable are so complex. Accounting for these factors could only be done in studies using information from individual-level information."

"Proper peer review must not be bypassed — and the onus for respecting its role falls not just on journalists but also on scientists to communicate the correct information accurately."

I'm suspicious -- and if I had more time I would be more suspicious of my suspicions -- for two reasons: one, a lot of those studies on the google docs list are preprints.  But more importantly, the call for "individual-level information."  What does this mean? I don;t think anyone is working with "individual level information" in all of these studies, so why does this one become a target?

1. Because it's Harvard PH, of Six Cities study fame, first linking air pollution to increased mortality and the key reference point for US air pollution regulation. There's a long history of the oil industry and their scientists just trying to pick holes and cast doubt on these studies out of Harvard.

2. The criticism smacks of the most recent devious strategy of the air regulation opponents, which is to call for individiual level data in epidemiological to be released in the name of "transparency." Which can't be done.

So who are these Canadian guys and are they up to something more than "just raising questions and being good scientific skeptics"?

UPDATE 1 HOUR LATER:

So I looked them up: Mark Goldberg was a member of the Reanalysis Team of the Health Effects Institute that validated the Six Cities Study: 

https://theasthmafiles.org/content/hei-validation-six-cities-study

Unlikely, then, that he is some undustry beard...

This article reports that 200 million people were left out of the only food relief measure for COVID-19 by the government of India. Under the National Food Security Act 2013, 800 million beneficiaries of India's Public Distribution System were to receive additional 5 kilos of grain for COVID-19 lockdown. But according to a press release by the government, 200 million were left out in April. The issue is not of availability, but distribution from godowns. Delhi and Punjab have only distributed 1% of grain mandated so far. The article also notes that even the number of 800 million is not enough. The NFSA is based on the 2011 census, after which India has added 150 million people 

Update on May 7, 2020

The Aarogya Setu app I wrote about below now has 100 million users, according to this article. Though the official line is that its download and use is voluntary, all central government employees have been mandated to use it, along with many private sector employers and landlords. The city of NOIDA (in the state of Uttar Pradesh, a satellite city of Delhi) will fine or imprison upto 6 months its residents and even those entering the city if they do not have the app installed on their smartphones.

I've also noted below that the app, developed by corporate volunteers, is one amongst an entire ecology of app-based contact-tracing efforts. Some of them are being developed by security and surveillance firms with support from state governments. Even though the app is from the government, the list of developers is not public and the code is inaccessible. India has no data privacy law. Its Information Technology Act 2000 is only applicable to the private sector, not to the state. This article dives deeper into the issue, pointing to tensions between two data protection bills under draft, one for personal protection, other for healthcare data. 

Apart from mass surveillance, this article argues that the app's security features are next to non-existent, and it is easy for users to perform "GPS spoofing": users can send requests to the app drawing overlapping circular boundaries around a specific area to arrive at an estimate of number of people with the infection. Sometimes, it is even possible to locate the exact house. Even for dense New Delhi, it was easy for the author to triangulate who was affected. For lesser dense areas, it would be even easier. When this is read alongside vilification of Muslims in India for being super-spreaders, the app could enable targeted attacks, even lynchings. 

Original Post on April 17, 2020

I dived digitally today into the fascinating world of COVID19 tracking and tracing apps and platforms being developed across India. This article reports that at least 19 apps are being used by Indian state governments and the national government to track COVID19 spread, including monitoring and arresting people who violate quarantine. India's lockdown is one of the strictest. Since the past two weeks, I have seen at least 15 videos on social media showing acts of police brutality, targeting migrant and daily wage workers.

As Rohit Negi notes, coronavirus arrived in India at a time when "ongoing centralisation of the polity and its subsumption into a personality-driven hypernationalist regime" have weakened transparency and accountability of public infrastructures. India's data infrastructures have to be located in this moment and in the broader shift towards "e-governance" or, in corporate-speak, data-driven government solution strategies. What do emerging COVID19 data infrastructures in India contribute to the conversation?

Rohini Lakshane writing for CitizenMatters.in has reviewed the many problems of these data infrastructures such as privacy and technical glitches. I find two notable trends in this emerging data infrastructure around COVID19 in India. 

1. Integration of demographic, geospatial, economic, and healthcare databases

In my research on air pollution science and advocacy in Delhi, I often heard that a significant obstacle to a proper public health response is separation of monitoring, epidemiological, and medical databases. Integration of databases is proposed as solution for efficient governance. The dream was to get out of the silos and into a unified data ecosystem, seamlessly connecting provider (the state) and user (citizen). The COVID19 response has shown that such integration is possible. The Indian national government's offical app Aarogya Setu (translates literally to Health Bridge but the connotation of health is holistic and restorative). It has been downloaded 10 million times. The government's IT Ministry asked all service providers in India to send text messages for people to download the app. It generates the user's location data using GPS and Bluetooth through their phone number and cross-references that with the Indian Council of Medical Research's databases. If a user enters an area where someone has been diagnosed positive for COVID19, they receive an alert. 

The Survey of India has created the SAHYOG app (translates to cooperation) to complement Aarogya Setu to connect demographic and geospatial data. It will integrate location information about biomedical waste disposals, containment areas, available hospitals for Covid-19 cases, ICMR testing laboratories, fire services, quarantine camps, banquet halls. The  Survey of India, set up in 1767 as the premier colonial surveying and mapping agency of the British empire, continues under the Department of Science and Technology for independent India. The SAHYOG app would rely on community health workers to supply it with information.

2. Collaboration between state governments and AI-based security/surveillance/cloud solutions provider firms based in India:

While Aarogya Setu and SAHYOG seem to be developed within the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY), state governments have developed collaborations with security/surveillance startups. Under MEITY's agenda of e-governance, private-public partnerships are encouraged. These partnerships are not new either. Unlike retrenchment of service provisions by the state elsewhere, one of the ways India cushioned neoliberal structural adjustment policies imposed by IMF and World Bank was to develop public-private partnership models. Apart from apps used by governments of Goa and Puducherry which are developed by Innovacer, a healthcare technology company based in San Fransico, US; the rest are developed by firms based in the urban centers of these states. 

These apps use multiple strategies to help the government manage the COVID19 lockdown. Kerala's Kasaragod district, a Covid-19 hotspot, uses Unmaze, a facial recognition app developed by Innefu Labs, to track 20,000 quarantined individuals.Unmaze works by matching location data of several devices and alerts users if they've come into contact with someone whose phone number or location data matches a positive COVID case. An alert is sent to the administrator to disinfect the area.  Innefu Labs, an "Information Security R&D startup" counts law enforcement agencies and defence research agencies as its clients. A documented client is the Delhi Police, for whom Innefu created an Automated Facial Recognition Software, used recently for identifying protestors and rioters in Delhi during the Citizenship Amendment Act protests. Till now, Unmaze has been used by the district police to catch 3000 violations leading to 200 arrests. Those found violating the lockdown are sent to mass quarantine camps. 

Another strategy being used by government of Karnataka and the city of Surat in Gujarat is to geotag selfies for monitoring home quarantine. The government texts people under quarantine with instructions to download the app. The users must post the selfie every hour, with mandatory geotagging. A backend team analyses these selfies, and if there is a mismatch between identity and location of user, a warning would come after which the person would be sent to a quarantine camp. The Tamil Nadu government uses CoBuddy, an application which sets perimeter limits and notifies district police when a person violates those limits, developed by Chennai-based Pixxon AI Solutions, an AI based solutions provider for video surveillance.

These examples show that the task of integration is at the core of these collaborations, evident in linking demographic, geospatial, and embodied data. Further, these data infrastructures are reconfiguring public health provisioning. The Telangana government has launched a 'T COVID 19' app together with Amazon Web Services, Cisco and Hyderabad-based startup Quantela as a comprehensive health management tool with self-assessment surveys. It is integrated with telemedicine support, remote medical appointment booking, and information about quarantine centers, testing centers. 

They are configuring transport infrastructures as well. The COVA Punjab app, underway in implementation in two Canadian provinces, would streamline curfew passes for emergencies and report mass gatherings and travel histoies. Apart from tracing home-quarantined patients and foreign-returned travellers, it will also process requests for groceries and consultation with doctors. The Chhattisgarh government is similarly using CG COVID-19 e-Pass to streamline the application process of getting permissions for vehicles to move across and between districts, developed by AllSoft Consulting, a web-development start-up located in Chhattisgarh's capital city, Raipur. 

What futures do these emerging data infrastructres point to? Mumbai-based multinational behemoth corporation Reliance Industries together with Facebook now aims to create a SuperApp a one-for-all service provisioning platform. A day after the launch of the Aarogya Setu app, the government of India created a "a committee, to develop and implement a “Citizen app technology platform” over the next three months" with participation of corporate titans, senior bureucrats and experts. Apart from the mandate to "integrate all data", the article also reports that one of the inputs suggested "using the platform to issue and manage ePasses for gig economy workers, something already underway in cities like Bengaluru, New Delhi and Hyderabad".

Tracing and understanding emergent data infrastructures being developed in India in response to COVID19 would be crucial in how we imagine coordinational and integration capacities of data infrastructures. What histories and other responses do these data infrastructures build on? What do they assume (for example, assuming obedience from smartphone users)? What futures would they point to?