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Favela of Cantagalo Pavão Pavdosinho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Misria
In response to

Favelas in RJ state are often located on hills, which served as refuge for enslaved people - after the abolition of slavery (1888) - and immigrants, who worked for downtown citizens. The Law of lands (1850) prevented unoccupied lands to be owned through labour and provided government subsidies for the arrival of foreign settlers to be hired in the country, further devaluing the work of black men and women. As a result, favelas today are mostly composed of a black population, surviving decades of persecutions and low incomes while defending, preserving and creating a unique culture rooted in African origins that reverberates into music and the arts. Children in favelas, due to social and economical inequality and racial discrimination, have less possibility of personal development and professional realization. They attend public schools where in 2021, according to SAEB, students do not reach a satisfactory level in Portuguese language (69%) and math (95%).

They hardly have access to after-school courses and do not tend to see themselves represented in the academic community. This produces a disadvantage in access to higher education and consequently in opportunities for decent employment. The project Closer to the Sky aims at co-producing scientific knowledge in collaboration between astronomers and artists/educators living in the favela of Cantagalo Pavão Pavdosinho (PPG, RJ, Brazil), for children, teenagers and young adults of the community. We will work in close collaboration with the social project Ninho das Aguias, where classes and night sky observations will be held.
Offering extracurricular courses and cultural experiences to students in the PPG, we wish to enrich their school curriculum and strengthen the chance they wish to stay in education after secondary school. A key element of the courses is providing positive role models of scientists from Afrodescendant backgrounds, reinforced by the presence of local artists and educators, thus endorsing their role within the academic community. The project also creates just work opportunities for local artists and educators, who will offer workshops rooted in favela culture, while at the same time creating novel, decolonial courseware based on contextualized science, i.e materials that use the context of marginalized societies as examples where we can understand, learn and make science. The material developed within the project will be shared as Open Educational Resources in several languages.

Barbosa Araujo, Claudio Alberto. 2023. "Closer to the Sky." 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, Hawaii, Nov 8-11.

Louisiana Tumor Registry Research & Critiques

tschuetz
Annotation of
In response to

Lawsuit led by River Region Crime Commission (RRCC) to retrieve LTR information

http://www.la-fcca.org/Opinions/PUB2004/2004-04/2003CA0079.Apr2004.Pub.12.pdf 

Article by Barbara Allen (2005). The problem with epidemiology data in assessing environmental health impacts of toxic sites

https://www.witpress.com/Secure/elibrary/papers/EEH05/EEH05048FU.pdf 

“The registry focuses on cancer incidence, which can be caused by a number of factors, instead of the risk faced by people exposed to emissions from industrial operations. In Terrell's view, that has allowed companies and by the state Department of Environmental Quality to misconstrue its significance.” (Mitchell 2021)

“While scientists will argue that the one-year reporting standard, as set by the state statute, is arbitrary, a five-year reporting timetable is equally arbitrary and less sensitive to changing health patterns. More problematic, however, were the eight large geographic regions. Each region consisted of as many as twelve parishes (a parish is a county in Louisiana) and in the case of the regions that include the parishes of the chemical corridor, industrial parishes are “diluted” by non-industrial parishes, making the determination of elevated cancer rates near chemical plants impossible to decide. The LTR also tends to downplay the rarer cancers, both adult and pediatric, saying the “rates tend to fluctuate because of small numbers...[and] are less reliable and should be cautiously interpreted” [4]. This infuriates the residents and researchers as these rare cancers are of major concern as they may be linked to chemical exposure.”

Response to new health study (March 2021) 

https://www.humanrightsnetwork.org/press/2021/3/22/new-public-health-study-does-little-to-allay-fears-in-cancer-alley 

 http://denka-pe.com/about-us/denkaunhr/ 

Tumor Registry Data Source

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Annotation of
In response to

“The Louisiana Tumor Registry (LTR) collects information from the entire state on the incidence of cancer. This information includes the types of cancer (morphology, grade, and behavior), anatomic location, extent of cancer at the time of diagnosis (stage), treatment, and outcomes (survival and mortality).”

 “[A]ny health care facility or provider diagnosing or treating cancer patients shall report each case of cancer to the registry. It also protects health care facilities and providers that disclose confidential data in good faith to the LTR from damages arising from such disclosures.”, see cancer reporting.

Toxic Release Inventory Mission

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Annotation of
In response to

Louisiana State University (LSU) School of Public Health

Mission: “To collect and report complete, high-quality, and timely population-based cancer data in Louisiana to support cancer research, control, and prevention.” 

The LTR was formally founded in 1979 under the auspices of Louisiana’s Office of Public Health.

In 1992, the U.S. Congress passed The Cancer Registries Amendment Act making official a national program of cancer registries and monies to fund them.