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.
Essay for the double-panel "Beyond Environmental Injustice", 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, March 22-27, 2021.
In their introduction, Vermeylen's argument for a particularist and decolonial approach to justice through a recognition of plural ontologies and epistemologies that decenters Western liberal discourse and its theory of justice. How does bringing the lens of coloniality into environmental justice literature alter our visions of energy futures? Can we make appeals to environmental justice without recourse to liberal theories of individual rights and property ownership? More specifically, I am wondering how our team can study and address this dynamic plurality of ways of understanding and experiencing in/justice in this site, and how can we engage this plurality in productive ways? What axes of difference and inequality should we be looking for/at (race, gender, class, sexual orientation, citizenship, housing status, etc)? If the Anthropocene is coloniality by another name, how can we foreground this in our approach?
The authors productively place three bodies of theory in conversation, abolitionist theories, urban political ecology, and decolonial theory, to rewrite the intellectual trajectories of EJ as extending the legacy of the Black Radical Tradition. What are our intellectual and political genealogies as students and researchers of the quotidian anthropocene? What genealogies are we pushing against? Drawing from their examples of spaces and historical moments of interracial solidarity, what kinds of coalitions do we see ourselves partnering with and contributing to as (largely?) newcomers to the activism in Austin?
In this fascinating review, the authors show how environmental justice is reproductive justice (following the water protectors at Standing Rock) and how this intersection reshapes understandings of the environment, embodiment, and exposure. I was particularly interested in the concepts of social and cultural re/production, and how we might think about this in light of Austin's rapid gentrification. They discuss an intersectional approach as a multi-scalar approach, from climate change to chemical exposure in the home - and I think this could be extended to a inter/multi-generational approach to justice (esp given our focus on renewables). The authors show how the RJ framework rethinks the individualism of reproductive choice as the right to conceive and bear children in conditions of social justice and human flourishing - then how does the current energy system (and future energy transitions) negate or create these conditions, and for whom? If we think about biological/cultural reproduction, how do we also incorporate the concept of reproductive labor into our analysis? Finally, I think they make an important point about the harms of documentation, and it would be great to hear everyone's thoughts (Esp those who have participated in earlier field campuses) on what the goal and ethics of our knowledge production are?
Walsh's piece gives us a concise history and geography of environmental racism in Austin, by drawing our attention to how ineequality is written into city law and urban planning. The ongoing legacies of segregation have shaped social life from access to public services to access to recreational spaces. Given the foundations of environmental racism in zoning laws and land use regulations, so succinctly highlighted by Walsh, how does/must the process of energy transition address these issues? Can there be zoning for justice, and what would that look like? In what way can our work at the field campus contribute to the existing work being done by orgs like El Pueblo and PODER?
The Compassion Protocol discusses current French laws and how they affect immigration and healthcare. In France, immigrants in need of healthcare that are unable to receive that healthcare in their native country would be given temporary residence permits and access to healthcare. The social factors, public health concerns, and human rights implications are discussed as well.
The authors all work at University of California San Francisco. Their names are Vicanne Adams, Taslim Van Hattum, and Diana English. Adams works at USCF and was the former director and vice-chair in the department of anthropology, history, and social medicine. She focuses her research in Global Health, Asian Medical Systems, Social Theory, Critical Medical Anthropology, Sexuality and Gender, Safe Motherhood, Disaster Recovery, Tibet, Nepal, China and the US. She has been involved in various publications and has received numerous grants from the NIH. Van Hattum and English are also within the department for Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine.
This article investigates the current state of disaster mental health research. They look at the presentation, burden, correlates, and treatment of mental disorders following disasters and look at the challenges surrounding those aspects of research.
The article discusses major psychopathology that is found in populations affected by disasters. They investigate disorders such as PTSD and MDD and pre-disaster risk factors associated with them. They discuss vulnerable groups, such as women and children. They also look at during and post-disaster factors and how they correlate to an increase in mental health disorders.
This report then discusses current interventions utilized and their effects on the prevalence of mental health issues. An issue they address is that many victims or those suffering do not seek help, making accurate research difficult.
Abstract