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.
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.
Chen, Alice. 2018.
Competing hegemonic discourses on lead risk and poisoning in SoCal.
“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
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.
This document is a brief history of statewide water management as well as national and CA state lead policies.
"To return to the story: with humanitarians effectively governing in crisis zones, it is not surprising that gender-based violence should become an issue; having been categorised as a human rights violation, one which garnered significant attention, it could not be easily ignored or brushed aside as a ‘private’ matter. Still, approaching gender-based violence as a humanitarian issue required some translation. Humanitarians are primarily concerned with saving lives and relieving suffering; humanitarianism of the sort practised by MSF is most significantly focused on health, and the lives and wellbeing of populations."
"The complications of treating gender-based violence as a humanitarian issue were raised early on by MSF in their work in the Congo Republic. In his essay, Marc Le Pape discusses how, because of rape and violence perpetrated by groups of armed men who set up roadblocks and then proceeded to do as they pleased with those they trapped, humanitarians had to decide whether to accept military escorts on aid convoys to protect against such roadblocks, again with serious political repercussions. Caritas did eventually allow trucks to carry military escorts, yet these escorts in turn invited their friends – armed militiamen – onto the trucks, even as they carried with them the spoils of their plunder"
"Humanitarianism’s mission has expanded so that it now occupies a dominant place in the global political arena – whether humanitarians asked for this or not. But the incorporation of genderbased violence shows humanitarianism at its limit; gender relations and gender-based violence cannot be contained by forms of crisis-driven, moral and medical intervention. In other words, this type of politics based on protecting a universal humanity cannot do all our political work for us; such violence renders visible inequalities that are simply unmanageable and unchangeable by its methods."
The entire study is focused on vulnerable populations – particularly those who due to racial or economic divides, do not have proper access to healthcare, or may be affected by factors such as poor housing and malnutrition.
Lead Risk