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Abstract

This study examines how living with unsafe and degrading infrastructures leading to lead poisoning in Southern California is an embodied experience mediated by class, race, and late industrialism.

Core Analytical Categories

“Risk”  - a term that is used by multiple actors in my fieldsite; public health officials, environmental scientists, school board members and parents all use this term when referring to lead p

Designating Late Industrialism

This document charts the ways this project develops our understandings of late industrialism, and in turn, how late industrialism, as an analytic, increases our understanding of lead poisoning.

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joerene.aviles

The main argument is that previous disasters involving burning buildings in US history and the subsequent investigations affected emergency response, policy making, and disaster investigation today. These past events can be applied to the 9/11 terrorist attack and investigation of the buildings afterward.

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joerene.aviles

1. “Chronic disaster syndrome” thus refers in this analysis to the cluster of trauma-and posttrauma-related phenomena that are at once individual, social, and political and that are associated with disaster as simultaneously causative and experiential of a chronic condition of distress in relation to displacement.

2. Most efforts to rebuild health care facilities focused on emergency care, routine care, and surgical services rather than psychiatry.

3. For many people, the idea that they had to stay in a state of heightened response to the pending “crisis”—a state they had already been in for over two years—produced huge anxiety and exhaustion.

4. Instead, the notion that New Orleanians themselves were a threat to public or national security circulated and became a rationale for the efforts the government did take to effect change in New Orleans. This change, in effect, targeted the poor. The poor, it seems, were to be evicted from New Orleans as a way to “clean up” the city and help it recover once and for all.