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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.

Lack of coverage and training for environmental journalism in Germany

tschuetz

"What does the lack in prominence of environmental coverage in German TV tell us about the general state of environmental journalism in Germany? It is almost impossible to draw con- clusions based on hard facts and numbers.There is no national organization of professionals in the media dealing with this topic like the Society of Environmental Journalists in the USA, for instance.That means there are also no statistics about how many editors, reporters, or producers would count themselves as environmental journalists; nobody is keeping track. Communications scholars, when asked about the number of environmental journalists in Germany, reply with: “That’s something I would also like to know; tell me if you find out.”There is no formal educa- tion, and only a few training opportunities are offered for established writers and editors who want to specialize in the field. In recent years, some well-qualified and experienced reporters on newspapers with influential voices have departed (or been made to depart) the publishing houses or even journalism per se, leaving a noticeable gap." (Schrader 2020)


"Summarizing, environmental journalism in Germany appears to be in a transition phase. Many traditional media and press outlets are struggling to keep their business model or find a new one. And reporting on air quality, biodiversity, or the climate beyond their often-superficial implications for national politics is not high on the list of priorities. Much of the work might be shifting to online publishing in new contexts and organizations, but those are still forming and far from settled."

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Sara.Till

Byron Good, Ph.D., is a professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School. His primary area of research is mental illness and how social perceptions evolves around these issues, in terms of both treatment and social acceptance. Dr. Good has several works on these issues, including several that explore the perspective of bio-medicine in non-western medical knowledge, the cultural meaning of mental illness, and patient narrative during illness. His publications including several papers, books, and edited volumes; he is regarded as a major contributor to the field of psychological anthropology. 

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Sara.Till

The article primarily asserts that how a patient narrates or describes their medical history is deeply rooted in their native culture. As such, physicians must be aware of how an individual's medical experiences can be altered based on this. In turn, physicians must recognize the importance of story-telling and anecdotes when receiving information directly from patients. Narratives project the patient's experience and events through their perspective, granting professionals a glimpse into their thought processes and action patterns.

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erin_tuttle

The author, Byron J. Good, is a Harvard professor in the department of global health and social medicine. He is the director of the International Mental Health Training Program, and has significant experience with field research that has led to many publications.

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erin_tuttle

The article’s main argument is that the narration of an illness is founded in the emotional connection it has to the sufferers life, the place from which they view the illness which includes individual and cultural aspects. Furthermore any lack of factual accuracy is an indicator of the social and cultural environment in which the illness presents itself and is revealing as to how it will be perceived and treated.

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erin_tuttle

The main argument is supported primarily through interviews with many individuals living in Ankara, through which they describe the first presentation of their seizures and in many cases the steps they tool to attempt a cure. Along with the interviews, statistics of the individuals interviewed and their diagnoses is used to provide a reference point to better understand their stories. Finally the article includes an analysis of narratives in a more general sense that can be applied to the narrative of an illness.

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erin_tuttle
  • “… illness narratives - both the corpus of story episodes and the larger life "story" or illness narrative to which they contribute - have elements in common with fiction. They have a plot; succession is ordered as history or event, given configuration.” (164)
  • “The diverse accounts of the illness in these narratives represent alternative plots, a telling of the story in different ways, each implying a different source of efficacy and the possibility of an alternative ending to the story. My point is not that persons having access to a plural medical system do not simply choose among alternative forms of healing but instead draw on all of them” (155)
  • “Predicament, human striving, and an unfolding in time toward a conclusion are thus central to the syntax of human stories, and all of these, as we will see, are important to stories about illness experience.” (145)

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erin_tuttle

Emergency response is not addressed in this article however it does provide emergency responders with insight into the stories those suffering from illness will have to explain their suffering. As emergency responders will often be working in societies and cultures very different form their own in the case of disaster response, it is important to understand that what may seem like fiction in a story cannot be dismissed without considering the deeper cultural significance of those elaborations.