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Hoover’s book is an analysis of the material and psychosocial effects of industrial pollution along the St. Lawrence River, which runs through the Mohawk community of Akwesasne. Hoover focuses on resistance to private and state efforts at land enclosures and economic rearrangements.  Hoover shows how legacy of industrialization and pollution (GM and Alocoa, primarily) ruptured Mohawk relationships with the river, and incurred on tribal sovereignty by disturbing the ability to safely farm, garden, raise livestock, gather, and recreate in ways fostered important connections between and amongst people and the land (“ecocultural relationships”). Hoover describes how confusion about risk and exposure is culturally produced and develops the "Three Bodies" analytic framework to show how individual, social and political bodies are entangled in the process of social and biophysical suffering. 

Hoover also highlights how in response to pollution, Mohawk projects of resistance emerged - a newspaper, documentary films, and  community-based health impacts research. Hoover conducts a comparative history of two research projects tracking the effects on industrial-chemical contamination on Akwesasne people and wildlife: the Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s epidemiological study in the 1980s, which failed to engage Akwesasne people in the production of knowledge or share results meaningfully, and the SUNY-Albany School of Public Health Superfund Basic Research Program study (in the 1990s and 200s), which ultimately began incorporating key theoretical and methodological principles of CBPR.

“Akwesasne residents’ main criticism of the Mount Sinai study was that at its conclusion, the researchers packed up and left, and community members felt they had not received any useful information.” (76) 

“As scholars of tribal health risk evaluation Stuart Harris and Barbara Harper explain, among most tribal people, individual and collective well-being comes from being part of a healthy community with access to heritage resources and ancestral lands, which allow community members to satisfy the personal responsibilities of participating in traditional activities and providing for their families.” (96)

“By placing “race/ethnicity” on a list of diabetes causes without qualifying why it is there, the CDC neglects the underlying root cause—that race/ethnicity is often associated also with class, education, levels of stress, and access to health care and fresh foods.” (231)

“Chaufan argues that to counter the focus on the medicalized aspects of diabetes, which has led to the individualization and depoliticization of the issue, a political ecology framework needs to be applied to the disease, one that is concerned with the social, economic, and political institutions of the human environments where diabetes is emerging.39 Such a framework would highlight how diabetes rates among Mohawk people are influenced more by changes in the natural environment and home environments than by genetic makeup.” (231 - 232)

“Understanding community conceptions of this intertwined “social and biological history” is important because, as Juliet McMullin notes, examining the intersections of health, identity, family, and the environment helps to “denaturalize biomedical definitions of health and moves us toward including knowledge that is based on a shared history of sovereignty, capitalist encounters, resistance, and integrated innovation.”61 The inclusion of this knowledge can lead to the crafting of interventions that community members see as addressing the root causes of their health conditions and promoting better health.” (249)

Katsi Cook, Mother’s Milk Project, collecting samples of breast milk: “Katsi has described this work as “barefoot epidemiology,” with Indigenous women developing their own research projects based on community concerns and then collecting their own data.” (90) - 61? – used a private lab to analyze samples because women did not trust the New York State Health Department

“Barefoot epidemiology” is a concept borrowed from China’s “barefoot doctors”—community-level health workers who brought basic care to China’s countryside in the mid-twentieth century. Hipgrave, “Communicable Disease Control.” According to a “workers’ manual” published by the International Labour Organization, barefoot research is often qualitative, and qualitative research is not the standard approach for conducting health studies, which tend to be based on laboratory experiments and clinical findings. See Keith et al., Barefoot Research” (294)

Civic Dislocation: “In many instances Mohawks experienced what Sheila Jasanoff calls “civic dislocation,” which she defines as a mismatch between what governmental institutions were supposed to do for the public, and what they did in reality. In the dislocated state, trust in government vanished and people looked to other institutions . . . for information and advice to restore their security. It was as if the gears of democracy had spun loose, causing citizens, at least temporarily, to disengage from the state” (118) 

“Dennis Wiedman describes these negative sociocultural changes and structures of disempowerment as “chronicities of modernity,” which produce everyday behaviors that limit physical activities while promoting high caloric intake and psychosocial stress” (235)

Third space of sovereignty: “This tension that arises when community members challenge political bodies while simultaneously demanding that they address the issues of the community has been theorized by political scientist Kevin Bruyneel, who describes how for centuries Indigenous political actors have demanded rights and resources from the American settler state while also challenging the imposition of colonial rule on their lives. He calls this resistance a “third space of sovereignty” that resides neither inside nor outside the American political system, but exists on the very boundaries of that system.” (259)

Elizabeth Hoover is an anthropologist and associate professor of environmental science, policy and management at Berkley, who long claimed to be native (receiving grants and research access under this assumption) but has recently admitted otherwise. She has a PhD in anthropology from Brown University  with a focus on Environmental and critical Medical Anthropology. 

“Enterprising attempts at incorporating local communities ‘on the margins’ into the ‘universal rationality of good business practice’ (Rajak 2011a: 17). In doing so, CSR activities seek to maintain low levels of resistance to corporate proposals.” p72. Also cites Welker2009_CorporateSecurityBegins. The Lord2016 is also a good example of this. 

An attempt to constrain critique with a survey of feedback about how to do the presentation of information of the scientists “better” and “more simply” 

“Members of the community, while criticizing the adequacy of scientific reporting as not telling the whole truth, accept to some extent the proposition that further information can be found, and that thereby they may possess this knowledge. However, focusing on technology as a form of knowledge and seeking to know its dimensions avoids questions regarding how things come to count as “knowledge and “not knowledge.” in the first place (Riles 2004). Insistence of better transparency allows for the possibility that transparency might in fact be possible: it “leaves the world itself intact. Intentionally or not, it depends on maintaining the absolute difference between representations and the world they represent” (Mitchell 2002:4).” p78

Policy brochures to publicize mitigation, “sustainable” activities, and community investment programs. Global companies often anticipate/precede the local government regulations. 

Use the fact that the government’s actual regulations are obscenely loose or nonexistent to say they are “Much more responsible than the law dictates” - a quote from a community liaison officer she interviewed. P71. Even if their levels are bad they can hide behind being “Better” than the standards. 

Signing the contract is a symbolic acknowledgement of the indigenous people’s rights to the land and to bargain with the company. (Though, of course, their water is still being totally wrecked, and the company lies to them). 

Lots of science - data - new technology to measure more accurately - scientists presenting, holding the reporting meeting

Tried to use photo evidence - but it was rejected because the indigenous people in the audience recognized that they were using the same photos from three years ago - which then caused additional “rejected the authenticity of the material that was being presented” -p75

Using the word “stable” (estable) to say it’s ok or that the impact is negligible - when in fact this can’t be known and it’s deeply improbable that it’s true - and even if the damage is “Stable” and not escalating, it is probably already at an unacceptable level. 

The manager of social relations person put his body in between the questioning indigenous person rejecting the truth value of the data and the scientist. 

Asking for feedback -because they know the community members are suspicious of their scientific data

The visit to the new drilling site - though it seemed like they were secretly extracting and they didn’t tell much and they couldn’t do anything about the fact that the corporation had already drilled way more than what they initially proposed they needed to drill to “monitor”

The interactions the corporation has with the indigenous people and the relationships they try to make are attempts to morally legitimate the extraction

They are giving the “gift of truth” about their activities with their reporting, they feel like they are conceding to their demands when they do the reporting and take them on tours, the investment in the community relations teams and the workshops to educate about science and having meals with the community members - I think the corporate actors are always aware that their goal is to quell resistance, but they might think that their presence is actually good for the indigenouspeople in in the long run once they start providing funds for community development and conceding to these demands and giving them “education”

“Company reporting on the environmental and social impacts of mining activities may by its very existence thus be projected as a “moral good”, an open gesture of asserted high moral value” p71 - cites a bunch of sources including Rajak2011_TheatresOfVirtue

Reporting to/ consulting with the community is one of the central “moral mechanisms” of CSR, and going to these reporting meetings is important to the people who are “impacted community” members. -  “The discourse of transparency is thus central to the moral framework of engagements between corporate actors and communities” -p72. 

Another way to say the same things: “Such CSR instruments - social accounting, community development investment, and transparency reporting - establish principles of “good business” and are used to make the claim of corporations acting as “agents of world benefit” (Maak and Pless 2009).” -p72 The source is a journal of business ethics. 

Standardization - “measures of fact and accounting assert that company activity is best made visible and internationally comparable (see also Li 2011)”. P72. The source is a Focaal article from the same issue as the Rajak. 

“Concerns with translocal legibility and universal administrative acceptability and the focus on rational economic behavior linked to audit have created an ethic of the visible, the transparent, as the highest standard of governance.” p72. She cites Garsten and Lindh de Montoya 2008, Peck and Ticknell 2002. 

The community people do think it’s an improvement to have any relationship with the corporation. They’re frustrated in part during their tour of the new digging that they won because only 2 people were there and one was a junior scientist and the other was from the contractors 

There’s parallel solutions on both sides (the tech, better info presentation vs participation in scientific monitoring, own experts) to increase participation and increase truth

In the case of Chile, to the extent that they exist, the laws for environmental mitigation/regulation are not really enforced. So any “responsible” actions are “lustered with voluntarily” and done totally on the corporation’s own terms. 

“social accounting” & “audit” techniques and institutions - they are “created by global business in concert with governments and civil society” . “performance requirements”

By the initiation of very obviously affected local indigenous communities, there is a legal contract between the mine’s foundation and the indigenous community that the mine would provide annual reporting to monitor the environmental impact and show that their water extraction was within the agreed-upon amount. The foundation otherwise funds social investment CSR programs for the mining company. They also agreed to give some annual money to community development in the contract. 

It’s not a unified CSR field, even for same industry in same region - some are opposed to providing money for community development, and only give money to local government or enterprises

Increasing staff hired on the social relations team - taking part in OXFAM workshops - “increase staff capacity and improve corporate ‘social performance’”p76

People on all sides seem to be fluent with the lingo of participatory development and CSR - the discourse has permeated and it’s become established

When the reporting meetings turn out to be “a waste of time” because community members don’t get much from the scientists, they switch to doing volunteering at the community and workshops to capacitar people to understand scientific info