Everyday life between chemistry and landfill: remaking the legacies of industrial modernity
Janine Hauer, M.A. (Researcher), Philipp Baum B.A. (Research assistant)
Janine Hauer, M.A. (Researcher), Philipp Baum B.A. (Research assistant)
我訪問到的阿嬤也有在高度人力密集的產業中工作過,如餐飲、紡織等等,反映了當代大環境中原民來到都市的處境。都市原民作為台灣產業發展的推手之一,卻無法擁有安身立命的家,而被迫在各處流浪,直到近代才開啟了與政府溝通的橋樑,卻依然有種種難題需要克服。
這次主要聊的是阿嬤們的遷移旅程,我們主要訪問到的是一對姊妹,年齡相差兩歲,在小學的時候因為有仲介介紹,一同來到台北工作。
以下是他們的遷移過程:
台東-花蓮-台北(有仲介介紹台北的工作,但很多人受騙被賣到妓院)-桃園-台北-新竹
小學因經濟因素離開台東,搭巴士到花蓮,再搭火車到台北(大概民國57年)
當你在搜尋器上打出那魯灣 新竹,會看到標題幾乎都是『全新開放絕美地景遊戲場!「那魯灣文化聚落」玩超快溜滑梯 』等等的文章,當你真正進去這個所謂『文化聚落』後,會發現原來這只是當權者的一種企圖,那魯灣所面臨的困境並非藉由地景遊戲場可以解決,但我發現這是一種政府慣用手法,將完全脫離脈絡的建築蓋在想要宣傳的地點上,當天進入社區後所看到的是兩種截然不同的景色,一方面可以理解政府為什麼需要對當地做重劃
This was our first time interviewing members of our tribal family, and we had the pleasure of interviewing three grandmothers.
There was a fire at the Lubrizol factory in Rouen in September 2019.
This text argues that the umbrella term citizen science has come to describe a variety of organizations and structures that function in a very different way. Not only does the notion of citizen science cover a wide variety of situations, but the term itself makes references to different types of organizations and is not neutral. Japan had forms of "citizen science" which pre-existed the introduction of the English term, as heirs to the development of more engaged scientific practices by politically inclined scientists in the 1970s.
The tensions within the use of the term citizen science and its diverse embodiments take the form of the following: basically, the concept of citizen science in Japan is mostly used in the context of top-down participatory approaches. The organizations that emerged after the Fukushima disaster are much more varied than this and exist within a framework that had been previously developed in Japan. This framework included visions of participatory and democratic science making by citizens, for citizens, and of citizens. They are mostly local organizations that are sometimes but not always affiliated to a network. Some of them cooperate with more formal institutions, while others steer clear of any collaboration with formal science or governments, partly because there is a lot of distrust towards these institutions in Japan, especially since the Fukushima accident.
One of the pitfalls of the reputation that citizen science projects have in Japan is that they are associated with the anti-nuclear movement and are therefore associated with the far left. This causes a need for distantiation from any political association, which some of the organizations studied use.
One of the reasons for the specific nature of data and knowledge management in this context is the economic necessity and attractiveness of stable, high paying employment. In terms of the beginning of the accumulation of local knowledge regarding the risks to which the workers and the neighbors were being exposed to, this clearly played a role. For fear of losing their good paying jobs, and due to the military nature of their occupation, workers never told anything about their jobs to their families, or didn't ask questions that could have led to uncomfortable answers. This dynamic continued later, as we can see by the testimony of the worker who worked on the clean-up of the Weldon Springs site. The Priest also notes that in the neighborhood, people were wary of information leaking, as it might depreciate their property values.
Something else which we can observe is that, on top of the economic necessity for preserving one's job, there is also a sentiment of pride in doing one's work properly. A worker recalls that the relationship that the workers had to having to wear blue (and reduce your actions because you were contaminated) was that it was just part the job, and that they had a job to do. After the Weldon springs plant closed, there was a liberation of voices, and it was easier to report health concerns. The sentiment of pride in doing ones work properly is completed by a sentiment of patriotism. The same worker, Mr Schneider, said: "We have to believe what our government tells us, what the heck, uh. Best country in the world, I still think it is." Another example of the relationship between the job and the risk is the testimony of the clean-up worker who said that they shut of their Geiger counters, because they were "just going nuts". Here we can see that when the risk is too high, it becomes less visible, less understandable, because it is inescapable. Another reason for the difficulty of accumulating and sharing information, at least until the 1990s, is the priority of beating the communists. The discourse of emergency and national priority is not conducive to asking questions (as we can observe today in different ways).
The closing of the Weldon Springs plant coincided with the rise of environmental concerns in the USA and the change in environmental perspective had an impact on the categorization of places such as the Weldon Springs one, which became a Superfund site. This required a change in management at the department of energy because they started needing to have conversations and interactions with the public. This did not solve all the knowledge management problems however, because the measures put in place to deal with the injustices were insufficient compared to the nature of the events that had unfolded.
This is for multiple reasons. The first the nature of the risk means that the production of knowledge and regulations was complicated by a lack of understanding of the different medical pathways, conditions, and interactions which lead to the development of health problems. The number of people affected is also quite small, so the statistics may not appear to be significant. The second is the complexity of the accumulation of data in order to gain reparation and recognition, something which led to a movement to make the process more collective, in order to support the data finding and management process and make the knowledge of the administrative procedures consolidated. Finally, there were instances where the records of employee exposure were falsified, which meant that the access to this information was impossible.