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The Glass Plate

sgknowles
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By Scott G. Knowles: As part of the STL Anthropocene Field Campus the research team visited the Wood Refinery Refinery History Museum on March 9, 2019. This museum is located on the grounds of the Wood River Refinery, a Shell Oil refinery built in 1917 and today owned by Phillips 66. The site is Roxana, Illinois, just upriver from Granite City, and just over two miles from the convergence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Sitting on the actual grounds of the refinery, the museum is an invitation to think across the micro, meso, and macro scales of the Quotidian Anthropocene, in terms of geography and also in terms of time. This refinery was built at the crux of the WWI, at a time when United States petrochemical production was entering an intensive phase of production, invention, corporate structuring, and global engagement. The museum is an invitation to think across temporal scales, backwards to the start of the refinery--through the individual lives of the workers and engineers whose lives defined the refinery--and forward to indeterminate points of future memory. This photo captures a key moment in an informal interview we did with one of the history guides. He had worked in the museum for decades before retiring. He explained to us that the museum sits in the former research facility of the refinery--and the glass plat he is showing reveals a beautiful artifact, a photograph made of the complex when it was built. Our guide only showed us this collection of slides after our conversation had advanced, perhaps after he was sure we were truly interested in his story, and the deeper history of the refinery. The pride in the place, the community of workers, and the teaching ability of the museum was manifest. The research team felt impressed, but also concerned about the health impacts (and naturally the environmental impacts as well) of the refinery. There was a mismatch in the scales--the memory of the individual tied to emotions of pride and knowledge of hard work done there--and the Anthropocene, global scale of petrochemicals. How do we resolve this mismatch? The glass plate is somehow a clue.

pece_annotation_1476028194

wolmad
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This study sought to establish the prevelance and corelation of intimate partner violance victimization in the six months before and after Hurricane Katrina. The studies conducted showed the following results:

The percentage of women reporting psychological victimization increased from 33.6% to 45.2 %.

The percentage of men reporting psychological victimization increased from 36.7% to 43.1%

Reports of physical victimization increased from 4.2% to 8.3% for women, but were unchanged for men.

The studies also showed that various socioeconomic standings from before the storm had significant impacts on how intimate partner violance increased after the storm.

pece_annotation_1476028448

wolmad
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This article was published throught the National Institute of Public Health's Public Access database. The NIH makes all of the peer reviewed articles and studies that it funds available to the public on this platform "to advance science and improve public health." 

pece_annotation_1476028586

wolmad
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The data for this study were collected as part of a larger, population-based, representative study of persons living in the 23 southernmost counties of Mississippi prior to Hurricane Katrina. This is not a new or inventive way of studying this issue, as a representitive study of a population is one of the classic ways social research is conducted.