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1619 Project

ramah
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This may not be the right place to post/share this, and I am happy to delete or move it! But I wanted to make a plug for the 1619 Project, and this post in particular, as helpfully complementing some of the other readings (such as McKittrick and Moore et al) on America's plantation history.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capital…

Hazardous waste work, race, and making disaster "professions"

ramah
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I began my research for these field notes by thinking about what kind of labor becomes available in the context of disaster relief/climate change? In my teaching this week, I have been talking about Cyclone Idai and mold as an example of one of how disasters unfold over different temporalities, as in Kim’s work, and via ‘aftershocks’ (Bonilla and Lebron 2019). Thinking about mold got me googling respiratory infections/respiratory health in New Orleans, which lead me to various sites that offer hazardous waste worker training programs (including under the auspices of environmental justice/community development work - e.g. http://www.dscej.org/our-work). This seems one example, among others, of how exposure to environmental harm is transformed into new sites of professionalization. This called to mind discussions of risky labor in the context of disaster, such as in Fortun 2001 or Petryna 2002, and to the centrality of respiration to thinking about anthropocenic processes (Kenner 2019). It highlighted how that transformation of geographical exposure into professional opportunity is then refracted via race and class; while some become hazardous waste clean up experts, others become climate change experts and professionals, who deploy expertise in the wake of other storms. Other accounts (https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2018/03/06/meet-the-refugees-fighting-for-the-future-of-new-orleans/) highlighted specific communities, such as refugee communities, as key sites of resistance to energy infrastructures including a new gas plant, which is being constructed in a FEMA-designated high-risk flood zone. This short stint of googling also lead me to a number of studies of respiratory health, many using spirometric readings to calculate the impact of exposure (for instance to remediation workers involved in cleaning after Hurricane Katrina) (eg. Rando et al 2012). Having recently read Lundy Braun’s book about race and spirometry (2014), these accounts highlighted for me how racialization is built into these processes in multiple ways: not only does race (along with class, professional background, geographical situation, etc) shape who is exposed and in what ways, it also shapes the how health and harm are measured and made visible in this context.Reference:Rando, Roy, John Lefante, Laurie Freyder, & Robert Jones. 2012. Journal of Environmental and Public Health. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jeph/2012/462478/

Where/whether to place human mobility in thinking anthropocenically

ramah
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Is there a place for thinking about the relationship between the governance of human mobility and anthropogenic processes in Louisiana? Reading the Andy Horowitz piece about Hurricane Harvey and the McKittrick piece about plantations got me thinking about the governance of human mobility as central to how New Orleans, and especially storms, are narrated. The ways in which mobility is made possible or impeded are central to ’storm narratives’. At the same time, recent news has highlighted how ICE activities have been concentrated in Mississippi, Louisiana, and other parts of the South. As the Southern Poverty Law Center notes, "The South is both a destination for new immigrants seeking security in the U.S. and a staging ground for deportation.” Louisiana - although perhaps not New Orleans - seems to be a key site in which these processes are visible. For instance, a report on NBC suggested that, “the number of detainees in facilities contracted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Louisiana and Mississippi surged from just over 2,000 at the end of 2017 to more than 8,000 as of July. That’s nearly four times as many as were detained in the two states in November 2017, the numbers show. Louisiana, with a population of more than 6,500, now has the largest population of ICE detainees of any single state apart from Texas.” One reason for this increase in numbers is financial. According to the SPLC, "The South, which already has some of the highest rates of incarceration in the country, is the bargain basement of immigration detention. Facilities charge among the lowest per diem rates in the country in order to land Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracts that can create jobs for communities, revenue for municipalities and profits for private prison operators, no matter the long-term cost. It’s an approach that flows from the South’s long history of looking to prisons filled mostly with people of color as a way to build local economies – a history that includes chain gangs and programs that “leased” prisoners to companies for work. Today, immigrant detention is but the latest chapter in that history” https://www.splcenter.org/20161121/shadow-prisons-immigrant-detention-south). Yet as this quote suggests, this mode of detention is also historical, and that history seems to play out in a number of ways. Facilities used to detain migrants have often also been used as prisons (including the La Salle detention center in Jena, Louisiana), for instance. But it seems that tensions around the notion of New Orleans as a "city of refuge” (Munyikwa 2019) are long-standing. Even as today, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports highlighted Cuban immigrants/asylum seekers, so too are tensions over racialized Caribbean migration longstanding. In the aftermath of the Haitian revolution, New Orleans was a kind of “flashpoint” (Kazanjian 2003) for tensions over migration and race as both French settlers from Haiti fled to Louisiana and as Afro-Creole refugees were expelled from Cuba. One report of the 1809 migration describes how “in Louisiana, as lawmakers moved to suppress manumission and undermine the free black presence, the refugees dealt a serious blow to their efforts.” http://www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/topic.cfm;jsessionid=f8302584551566978728483?migration=5&topic=3&bhcp=1 These are all clumsy linkages, and I’m not sure I want to draw historical analogies across contexts about which I have only cursory knowledge, but it seems to me that there are linkages or repetitions of connections between labor, environment, and human mobility that for me provoke questions about the relationship between anthropocenics and regimes of human mobility and carcerality (beyond just the notion of ‘climate refugees’). Resources consulted: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/ice-detainments-surge-mississippi-louisiana-alarming-immigration-advocates-n1042696 Southern Poverty Law Center & National Lawyers’ Guildhttps://www.splcenter.org/20161121/shadow-prisons-immigrant-detention-southhttps://www.splcenter.org/news/2019/04/10/cuban-men-thrown-louisiana-prisons-despite-legal-asylum-requests http://www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/topic.cfm;jsessionid=f8302584551566978728483?migration=5&topic=3&bhcp=1 https://www.theadvocate.com/gambit/new_orleans/news/the_latest/article_8687dfba-a127-5bb9-9635-25502c2916dc.html https://nolapsc.org/human-rights/ Munyikwa, Michelle. 2019. ‘Up from the dirt’: Racializing Refuge, Rupture, and Repair in Philadelphia. Dissertation submitted to the Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania. 

Creating a mobile disaster industry

ramah
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I haven’t gone as deeply into this as I’d like, but I started by trying to find out which private firms/actors were associated with disaster response in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (beyond the groups, like Blackwater, that made headlines). What I actually found was the way in which New Orleans- and Louisiana-based firms and individuals are positioning themselves as disaster experts (or, as seems to be the preferred language, experts in resiliency and preparedness) in the wake of Katrina and subsequent storms (e.g. Isaac). So, groups involved in the initial response include companies like Beck Disaster Relief, AshBritt, Shaw Group, Korte, Fluor, Halliburton spin-offs, and Akima site contractors, but these groups have also used Katrina to position themselves or consolidate their position as disaster relief specialists. Other organizations, like Greater New Orleans Inc (GNO), Royal Engineers, Hammerman and Garner International and others, expanded from local contracting or civic bodies to national or international actors, as experience navigating not only the material landscape of Katrina but also the bureaucratic and financial landscape of FEMA became a selling point for further projects — for instance, many of these organizations went on to bid for public contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and subsequent preparedness activities. If these firms point to a genealogy of expertise spooling forward from Katrina, there are also financial genealogies that predate the privatized response to Katrina — for instance, the way Housing and Urban Development’s community development block grants (CDBGs), originally designed to promote “urban revitalization” became used as disaster relief funds. I also have not included here the key role played by humanitarian agencies and NGOs, both nationally and overseas.The other way I’ve been preparing for the Field Campus is by thinking about the stakes of claiming - in my own work or in the work of these firms - New Orleans (and especially a mass-mediated event like Katrina) as a site for authorizing and producing knowledge. To that end, thinking with Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds, and Tina Campt’s work on refusal has been helpful, since these authors are concerned in part with how the hypervisibility of Black suffering underpins so much of American political life, and locate Katrina as part of that; those texts are helping me to start thinking about what possible starting points for my thinking might exist in relation to this analytical/geographical/empirical anthropocenic space.Some media accounts and reports:https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/08/secret-history-hurricane-katrina/https://corpwatch.org/article/katrina-contractors-rake-it-they-clean-ithttps://iem.comhttps://www.nola.gov/community-development/documents/isaac-recovery-program/action-plan-amendments/cno-isaac-action-plan-amend-1/https://capitalresearch.org/article/private-sector-disaster-relief/https://resconnola.com

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Sara.Till
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Emily Goldmann, PhD, MPH: current assistant research professor at NYU College of Global Public Health, Dr. Goldmann researches environmental and social determinants of mental health conditions. Formerly employed by NYC department of Health and mental Hygiene in the Bureau of mental Health, Dr. Goldmann focused on surveillance of psychological distress, serious mental illness, and psychiatric hospitalization of New Yorkers following Hurricane Sandy.

Sandro Galea, MD, MPH : a canadian/american board-certified emergency physician, Dr. Galea is currently the Dean of BU School of Public Health and former Chair of the Department of Epidemiology of Columbia University's Mailman School of Global Public Health. His particular research includes social production of health within urban populations, and especially notes psychological and mental health disorder prevalence within vulnerable populations, including mood-anxiety disorders and substance abuse. He also has participated in multiple committees and boards analyzing effects of mass trauma in the wake of international conflicts and disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, Iraq/Afghani wars, 9/11, and sub-Saharan Africa  conflicts.

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Sara.Till
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The film centers around Camp Lejuene, a Marine Corps base in Jacksonville, North Carolina. The camp experienced contaminated water from about 1957 to 1987; the wells contained 240-300 times the allowed amount of volatile organic materials. The film follows the struggles of individuals who lived in Camp Lejuene during this time to receive information, compensation, and recognition for what they experienced. While many individuals are interviewed and discussed, the film specifically focuses on Jerry Ensminger, a former Marine Corps Master Sgt. for almost 25 years. Ensminger lost his daughter, Janie, to pediatric leukemia while living on the base. He is one of many parents and former residents who were directly effected by the contaminated water. The VOM's in the water included TCE, PCE, and benzene, all known to cause cancer and childhood defects.  

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Sara.Till
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1) Current criteria surrounding clinical depression: While most of us hold an idea of what depression is, physicians have been given the task of specifically categorizing this nuanced disease. Also called "major depression", clinical depression is the prolonged sensation of low mood during almost all times/activities. These sensations must be present for at least 2 weeks and be persistent across daily activity in order to be considered major depression

2) CBT: Cognitive behavioral therapy is the current widely used model for psychosocial intervention. It focuses on the patient developing coping strategies to aid in emotional regulation, curb unhelpful cognitive patterns, and seek personal solutions

3) Vignette: Never heard of this word before. The term originally referred to small, pleasing sketches, views, engravings, photographs, or illustrations. However, the term is used here to describe a story of patient care. The quick snap-shot is a far-cry from the typical encyclopedia given to health care providers about a patient; it acts as a small, short tale depiction of the scenario, the intervention used, and the outcome. 

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Sara.Till
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Individuals who have been involved in a traumatic event are considered a vulnerable population, especially those who have been involved in something like a sexual assault. Those who have been victimized often have very little knowledge of the services available to them or the nuances of the systems with which them must interface. Thus, these individuals (after coming off a severe emotional and physical trauma), must then navigate a complex system that often feels biased towards the accused. This report summarizes their experiences and the shortcomings of this system. 

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Sara.Till
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1) Fukushima's nuclear safe guards followed the current accepted nuclear regulations. In addition to having back-up generators and short-term batteries to support the reactors during power failure, ownership had extensive emergency plans for tsunamis. These were executed and creative solutions were utilized with necessary. This then begs the question as to how such a well-prepared facility experience massive devastation.

2) Japan is known to be a first-world nation constantly innovating and exploring new technology, with an advanced economy and high emphasis on education. Dr. Schmid refers to members of the Japanese government as "scientifically trained, technologically savvy elites." While Dr. Schmid acknowledges nuclear energy to still be a murku field, Japanese officials represent the individuals most capable of making informed, knowledgeable decisions about nuclear facilities. This only further emphasizes her assertion that a set, elite organization needs to be created to handle nuclear emergencies.

3) While several organizations exist to discuss nuclear power on an international level, there is no entity which serves as a governing body over nuclear facilities. Nuclear emergencies very quickly spread from single-nation disasters to international events. Although there are many internationally recognized policies and guidelines, there is no body to ensure these are followed. Moreover, no single nation or organization at the present time has the fiscal capabilities or specialized knowledge to aid during nuclear disasters.