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Youth's brilliance and their fascination with the wickedness of plastic pollution are forming shoals of abundant possibility and collective futurity amid the rising tides of environmental destruction hitting Bahía de los Ángeles, México. Working in an entangled community with professional scientists, government conservationists, traditional outdoor educators, store owners, school principals, chefs, artists, and family this group of youth (ages 7-17) labor and dream as scientists and cartographers of the future. They voice unpopular questions and concerns, embody lives they mourn leaving behind but understand can't persist, demand more from adults and tourists, labor for imperfect data that they hope will hold community accountability, and (re)map community infrastructure, tracts of refuse, flows of water, chains of fossil fuel transport, food systems, and fishing practices. Despite these undeniable contributions, often adult partners in this work are still slow to take youth thinking and resistance seriously---it is easier to mediate on shortcomings or flaws in youths' epistemologies. Ignoring these sophisticated shoals is a flagrant dismissal of the pluralist thought and perspective required to attend, nonetheless halt, environmental injustices. As adults labor on/for youths' futures there should be a constant disruption of who holds expertise and why and rigorous attention given to youth voice.

Fowler, Kelsie. 2023. "Youth and Community Knowledges Create Thick Shoals of Abundance Amid the Plastiocene." 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.

How does visualizing allows us to set the parameters to make the future vision a reality?

The author of this article is Scott Gabriel Knowles, the department head and an associate professor in the Drexel University Department of History Center for Science, Technology and Society. His focuses are on risk and disaster, with particular interests in modern cities, technology, and public policy. He also serves as a faculty research fellow of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware and since 2011 he has been a member of the Fukushima Forum collaborative research community. His more recent works include:

The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).4

Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City (Editor, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

"Defending Philadelphia: A Historical Case Study of Civil Defense in the Early Cold War" Public Works Management & Policy, (Vol. 11, No. 3, 2007): 217-232.

This article examines how disaster investigations in the United States have evolved over time, from the burining of the capitol building near the birth of the republic through the theater fires and boiler explosions of industrialization to the collapse of the world trade centers at the present, showing how the modern, bureaucratic system of disaster investigation was built. 

This arguement is supported by looking at 4 specific case histories and examining the factors contributing to the investigations in each.

1. The 1814 Burning of the Capitol Building - Investigation of the disaster conducted by one engineer, B.H. Lathobe, who was given vast resources with very few obsticles, except for financial constraits and an impatient congress, to complete his investigation and reconstruct the building. 

2. 1850 Hauge St. Explosion - After a major boiler explosion in Manhattan's Lower East Side, a pannel of "jurrors" and "experts" were called together to complete investigations, bring forth the history of the fauty boiler, and place the blame for the accident in an effort to "memorialize the dead and bring them justice." Because of the way this investigation was conducted, the blame could not be accurately placed so everyone involved was blamed for the failure.

3. 1903 Iroquois Theater Fire - John Ripley Freeman, a fireproof engineering expert and factory inspector, was brought in to complete a report and provided one of the first "modern" scientific disaster investigations. He utilized a new network of investigators, engineers, insurance companies, testing labs, and inter-industry coordination that characterizes modern disaster investigation. 

1. "Clashes over authority among powerful institutions both public and private, comptetition among rival experts for influence, inquiry into a disaster elevated to the status of a memorial for the dead: these are the base elements of the World Trade Center investigation. And yet, even a brief historical review shows us that these elements are not unique."

2. "In this article, I will show that conflicts over authority, expertise, memory, and finally the attribution of responsibility suffuse the history of disaster in the United States."

3. "Blame, memorial, and reconstruction tend to outpace technical consensus."

Detailed research into historical cases was done to produce the claims and arguements presented in this article. No new investigation was conducted to obtain support for the arguement, and the historical cases were used to draw ties with the ongoing investigations taking place at the World Trade Center site.

Emergency response is not specifically mentioned in this article, as the focus of the article is investigation in the aftermath of disaster. In some cases, such as the Iroquois Theater Fire and the World Trade Center, investigations found that had more adequite emergency fire response been available at the time of the accident the outcome of the disaster could have been much different.

This article has been referenced in various other articles in the DSTS field, including Engineering Risk and Disaster: Disaster-STS and the American History of Technology (S. Knowles) and The World Trade Center Analyses: Case Study of Ethics, Public Policy and the Engineering Profession (WH Coste).

The information from this article was drawn from various primary sources such as letters, historical and modern news reports pertaining to the cases being studied, and other peer reviewed articles.