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Afrofuturism

Misria

Sylvia Wynter (2003) suggests that our current struggles in Western colonized society regarding racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, ethnicism, climate change, environmental destruction, and the unequal distribution of resources are rooted in what she argues is the overrepresentation of the descriptive statement of Man as human, which only recognizes white, wealthy, able-bodied, heterosexual men as "human." As such, just as I argue Black feminist writers and scholars have drawn on speculative methods and Afrofuturism, the use of twentieth-century technology and speculative imagination to address issues within Black and African diasporic communities (see Dery & Dery, 1994), to insist on and explore the full humanity of Black girls, women, and femmes, so too have Black and African diasporic scholars called on Afrofuturism to imagine new ways technology and traditional knowledge practices can address environmental injustice. Suékama (2018) argues that as a form of resistant knowledge building and theorizing, an Afrofuturist approach to environmentalism “integrates speculation with the ecological and scientific, and the spiritual or metaphysical'' to make our environmental justice less European, male, human, (and I would add capitalist) centered. Thus, an Afrofuturist approach to environmental injustice asks us to think about our collective struggle for environmental justice as a part of and connected to other forms of systemic oppression rooted in the rejection of African diasporic and Indigenous people and their knowledge practices through the overrepresentation of Man as human in Western society. In this way, a speculative and Afrofuturist approach to environmental injustice draws on African diasporic knowledge practices in conjunction with modern and traditional technologies to imagine new solutions to environmental injustice that center the needs, values, and traditional practices of African diasporic people.

Peterson-Salahuddin, Chelsea. 2023. "An Afrofuturist Approach to Unsettling Environmental injustice." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

TS: Formosa Plastics' Newspaper

tschuetz

Formosa Plastics publishes a quarterly newspaper called 親親報報 Qin Qin bao (engl. kiss kiss hug). A group of citizen journalists by the Taiwan Environmental Information Center and the initative FPCC Go Away have criticized the newspaper for different attempts of greenwashing (Wu 2015). The newspaper issues include arguments guaranteeing the safety of the 6th Napthha cracker's emissions, interrogrations of research about high PM 2.5 levels in the county and statements about supposed local population growth.

A 2012 blog entry by FPCC Go Away analysis the distribution and publication practices of the newspaper. Notably, the authors point out that an issue of the newspaper addressing PM 2.5 levels was re-published and distributed in the days leading up to a public speech by Prof. Zhan Chang-quan (Department of Public Health at National Taiwan University) who had studied air pollution in the county.