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The authors offer a review of themes within occupational health and environmental public health surveillance over the past decade. In reviewing the history of public health surveillance, the authors highlight key acts of Congress in the 1970s that have made the development of “modern” occupational health and environmental health surveillance possible—but which also failed to develop into a cohesive and well-connected data management systems across federal agencies. Separate agencies were tasked with different data collection, management and intervention tasks in ways that fragmented the surveillance system to the point of ineffectiveness.

The authors argue that effective surveillance for occupational and environmental health demands development of a clear purpose for collecting data and having the data available to make meaningful analysis possible. They turn to the CDC’s childhood lead prevention program to demonstrate these points.

The case study findings in the text have been discussed with senior staff at the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services and members of the California Latino Legislative Caucus. It has also been presented at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration during a Scoping Analysis workshop with California policymakers and advocates.

“Despite these disadvantages, the state of California has failed to map wildfire vulnerability based on socioeconomic status. Without an accurate identification and mapping process, the state is unable to provide local governments and community-based groups with a reliable rendering of the populations most vulnerable to the impacts of wildfire. Most importantly, by failing to identify socially vulnerable communities across California, government entities are unable to understand in advance where to target limited resources and programs (Sadd et al., 2011).” (Mendez 57)

“To further ensure participation and strengthen capacity, federal, state and local governments should provide appropriate funding to community-based organizations working directly with vulnerable populations.Community-based organizations have stronger cultural competency in engaging with communities of color and immigrants,

greater levels of trust, and more flexibility to explicitly assist these populations. In community-based planning processes, vulnerable communities are actively engaged in the identification, analysis and interventions, monitoring, and evaluation of disaster risks. This approach helps reduce their vulnerabilities and enhance their capacities.” (Mendez 59)

This text highlights the importance of a mixed methods approach to disaster planning. Specifically, the importance of incorporating qualitative research methods as a way to anchor the voices of marginalized communities within disaster planning and provide context to emerging trends observed in climate related risks.  Regarding disaster planning and undocumented immigrant communities for example, Mendez (2020) stresses that practitioners must go beyond addressing the contextual vulnerability of these communities and consider how to address systemic problems perpetuated by the agricultural industry. The lack of accountability and disregard for human life within the industry, coupled with the lack political power within undocumented immigrant communities, particularly those belonging to the Mixteco/ Indigena indigenous groups, are systems of oppression which must be addressed if climate disaster risks are to be truly addressed.

Mendez (2020) stresses that the intersectionality of race, class, gender, indigeneity, and many other dimensions of identities coalesce to shape the lived experiences of people in their local environments. Traditional quantitative methods, though useful in providing snapshots of disaster vulnerability, can do little in capturing the social environmental conditions which determine responses to extreme weather and climatic events. At best, it can serve to provide an obscured understanding of disaster risks, at worst, this one-dimensional methodology approach may exacerbate existing inequalities perpetuated by systems of racism, classicism, and sexism by rendering whole communities invisible simply by virtue of sampling biases (Mendez, 2020). The case study by which Mendez frames his central argument focuses on how Indigenous immigrants were systematically ignored in emergency response and alleviation efforts following the Thomas Fire in California’s Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. 

"Scott and Chakrabarty’s critiques tell us less about postcolonial studies’ limits than about the difficulty even its most eminent scholars have keeping its history in mind"

"Advocating resistance and critiquing the conditions of resistance are not, contra Scott, inherently opposed or even separate activities"

"During his “ethical turn,” Derrida reconceived the ultimate point of such deconstructive reading: no longer articulating différance it became instead responding to the experience of the other (Derrida 2002: 230–98; Spivak 1999: 426–8)."

"It becomes instead the capacity and willingness to surrender its agency to the other, thus exposing itself to a future it cannot control. Levinas’s redefinition of the human attempted, in its own way, to place the Hegelian tradition on its feet again. Though Gramsci and Fanon are both frequently assimilated to that tradition (as Scott’s and Chakrabarty’s critiques illustrate), the intellectual’s relationship to the colonized in their work prefigures, if again inchoately, the ideas of responsibility and futurity evident in Levinas and Derrida."

"The problem with Orientalism is precisely its ontological—not ethical—approach: the Orientalist seeks knowledge of the other to master it, decidedly not to protect its epistemic difference. [... ] Orientalism thus declares an epistemological as well as ontological difference between the European and the non‐European. Indeed, the former is the very source of the latter: Europeans and Orientals are different types of being precisely because they have different ways of knowing."

"[T]o think of responsibility as a freedom, you need that very humanistic education which teaches rebellion against it” (Spivak 2012: 461).4 “Humanist education” in general trains the “ethical reflex” in precisely the same way literary study in particular does: it opens one to forms of consciousness fundamentally different from one’s own. Such openness eventually requires one to “rebel” against one’s training itself: the oth- erness of some text—indeed, perhaps every text—will exceed what one has been taught."

"If Marxism responded to capitalism dialectically, wanting to replace it with a single and even more universal system, anti‐globalization movements now respond to capitalism deconstructively, wanting instead to articulate the disparate demands of those who build the global economy but are neither seen nor heard there. If they remain so, who will crawl, Spivak asks, “into the place of ‘the human’ of ‘humanism’ at the end of the day, even in the name of diversity?” (Spivak 2005: 23)."

"[T]he genealogy of postcolonial theory recounted here—from Gramsci and Fanon through Said and Spivak to Chakrabarty and Scott—can be read as a necessarily endless effort to rethink the revolutionary principle of freedom from the perspective of those to whom it was never designed to extend."

shortly attaching this news article on "coronavirus lockdown protests" to this reading. should be an obvious one to all. 

Re: the discussion on "our" concepts of freedom

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Adding a popular quote - from Kafka's "A Report to an Academy" 

I fear that perhaps you do not quite understand what I mean by "way out." I use the expression in its fullest and most popular sense—I deliberately do not use the word "freedom." I do not mean the spacious feeling of freedom on all sides. As an ape, perhaps, I knew that, and I have met men who yearn for it. But for my part I desired such freedom neither then nor now. In passing: may I say that all too often men are betrayed by the word freedom. And as freedom is counted among the most sublime feelings, so the corresponding disillusionment can be also sublime. In variety theaters I have often watched, before my turn came on, a couple of acrobats performing on trapezes high in the roof. They swung themselves, they rocked to and fro, they sprang into the air, they floated into each other's arms, one hung by the hair from the teeth of the other. "And that too is human freedom," I thought, "self-controlled movement." What a mockery of holy Mother Nature! Were the apes to see such a spectacle, no theater walls could stand the shock of their laughter.

No, freedom was not what I wanted. Only a way out; right or left, or in any direction; I made no other demand; even should the way out prove to be an illusion; the demand was a small one, the disappointment could be no bigger. To get out somewhere, to get out! Only not to stay motionless with raised arms, crushed against a wooden wall.