SfAA Panel: Beyond Environmental Injustice
Essay for the double-panel "Beyond Environmental Injustice", 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, March 22-27, 2021.
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michael.lee"Moreover, in any mumber of disasters over the past two centuries, the 'disaster investigation,' far from proving itself the dispassionate, scientific verdict on causality and blame, actually emerges as a hard-fought contest to define the moment in politics and society, in technology and culture."
"And, no investigation he could provide would change the fact that most Americans viewed the burning of the Capitol in 1814 as a diplomatic and military, not an engineering, disaster."
"Certainly the move to NIST places a great premium on the power of "investigation" as not only a technical, but also a moral tool, a sacred act, assigning a higher meaning to the tests and calculations that must ultimately assign causes and fix blame--but this is nothing new in American history. While the investigator's tools may have sharpened since Latrobe's study of the Capitol, the Hague Street inquest, or the Iroquois Fire, disaster investigation still pits expert against expert, the demand for patient study against the will to rebuild and forget."
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michael.leeThis policy was, in part, designed to prevent "patient dumping" whereby hospitals would refuse to treat certain patients due to inability to pay for treatment and either refuse admittance or transfer them to other hospitals. Furthermore, it specifically addresses female patients in active labor, requiring that hospitals ensure that these patients are also treated and stabilized in the emergency department or receiving facility.
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michael.leeThe authors rely heavily on anecdotal evidence provided through interviews of survivors of Hurricane Katrina, though they supplement this with statistics, socioeconomic data, and mental health data.
Law does more than codify, regulate, and control; it also catalyzes and transmutes, provoking cascading social and cultural effects, particularly when the force of law is informational.