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What I find really noteworthy in this text is how Julia Watts Belser takes the poem by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and includes it into a scientific text. In this way, she not only allows an affected person to have her say, the poem also leaves the reader with a very striking image of the connection between the river and the body, in multiple ways, as well as the connection between enviromental harm and disability.

The text was published in 2020 (Vol. 40, No. 4) by The Ohio State University Libraries in their Journal Disability Studies Quarterly (DSQ). It is, as you can read on their Homepage "a multidisciplinary and international journal of interest to social scientists, scholars in the humanities and arts, disability rights advocates, and others concerned with the issues of people with disabilities. It represents the full range of methods, epistemologies, perspectives, and content that the field of disability studies embraces. DSQ is committed to developing theoretical and practical knowledge about disability and to promoting the full and equal participation of persons with disabilities in society."

The author connects disability theories and activism with environmental justice, this approach allows her to show how disability is related to and through environmental harm, she shows how diagnoses are used politically in these cases, and looks critically at how these processes determine how, when and in what favor human and environmental harm is taken into account. The writing is shaped by the consequences of the Anthropocene like environmental harm linked to health isusses, especially affected are communities of color and poor communities in the United States, here pre-existing patters of structural inequality, already known from climate change come into play,  this communities are the most affected and the least responsible.

The text left me with a question that I actually often find frustrating in the process of research. On page 6, the authors take up the criticism of a Fukushima resident who says: “[W]hat you call research does not give benefits to local people” (Miyamoto and Ankei, 2008, cited in Ankei, 2013, p.24). The authors here suggest adopting or borrowing terms from the field that are used by citizens to create a more “socially robust science” (Bonhoure et al. 2019, Nowotny, 2003). From the authors' point of view, this can be achieved above all by paying closer and careful attention to the language of citizen organizations and the contexts these groups work in. After further elaboration, the authors call for citizen science terms and concepts developed by, for and with citizens to better reflect the values, priorities, and stakes of its main agents and of all concerned parties. But I am not sure that this approach alone would be sufficient to adequately address such expressed criticism. Perhaps one should ask about the expectations of people one is researching with/about in order to enter into a conversation and to be able to understand this criticism. Perhaps the authors will address this point again in further publications. I think to ask oneself how to deal with this criticism methodically and ethically could also be very fruitful for empirical research in general.

The history of racialized exclusion to both social power and land tenure and homeownership has shaped how bodies are differentially impacted by land use in NOLA. This entire history could (and probably already is) a topic for a dissertation, but one case I found particularly interesting involved the Army Corps of Engineers' 2007 creation of an online database in which residents can find the "flood potential" faced by their homes (http://nolarisk.usace.army.mil/ --unfortunately no longer up).  While this database was hailed as a landmark achievement in providing NOLA residents with their "right to know" about the risks in their neighborhoods, only a few remarked on what the data actually showed: that in the two years following the flood predominantly white neighborhoods had experienced 4-6 feet of flood reduction, black neighborhoods had experienced little to no flood reduction whatsoever. 

This reminds me of a more general entanglement of racialized disparities, historical disinvestment and inequitable distribution of risk in America, which as Anna Clark so summarily puts it (in respect lead": "lead is one toxic legacy in America's cities. Another is segregation, redlining, and rebranding: this is the art and craft of exclusion. We built it into the bones of our cities as surely as we laid lead pipes."  

One interesting example of land use education that I found is the Whitney Plantation Museum in Wallace, LA--about an hour north of New Orleans proper and right on the banks of the Mississippi River. The museum is, according to its website, "the only plantation museum in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on the lives of enslaved people." The 2,000 acre property was once a sugarcane plantation that operated from 1752 until well into the 19th century, with over 350 enslaved persons working on it during this period. 

The museum was founded in 2014 by John Cummings, who has spent more than $8 million of his own fortune on this long-term project, and worked on it for nearly 15 years.[ The director of research is Ibrahima Seck, a Senegalese scholar who has done much work on the history of slavery. These two seem to be the primary organizers of education in the musuem which focuses on how land in the Lower Mississippi was organized towards the cultivation of Sugar. 

Right off the bat, it is interesting that this museum is completely financed by a private citizen. I've looked up other plantation museums in the region and for the most part they see to all be privately run. Also, contrast the focus on slavery at Whitney to the Oak Alley plantation museum's celebration of a family legacy of sugar planters: "Hold fast to that which is good...."

The question of data relates to Denise Brock’s key role in the passage of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA). Brock independently collected thousands of documents related to the health of  workers in nuclear facilities like Weldon Spring in her efforts to show that they had been exposed to pathological levels of radiation. In many cases, their employers were fully aware of the dangers these workers faced, but kept this information to themselves or hidden away in the private documents that Denise uncovered decades later. Prior to Denise's work this information was not publically available, and if workers who had become ill wanted to receive compensation for worksite expose, they would have to undergo exposure reconstruction assessments, which--due to the lack of accurate and available data--were imperfect evaluations of the actual levels of radiation workers had been exposed to. Due to Denise's advocacy, which led to the passage of the EEOICPA, workers at nuclear facilities are exempted from the exposure reconstruction assessments and are eligible for compensation payments up to a maximum amount of $250,000, plus medical expenses for accepted conditions.

Denise's experience raises a few questions and reflections on data in the Anthropocene:

•  Issues like worksite and environmental exposure are often plagued by invisibilities and what STS scholars have referred to as "agnotologies"--where can activists/scholars/any interested party gain access to relevant data in relation to these issues (in a similar fashion to Denise's work)?
• For historians in particular: do the thousands of documents Denise complied consitute an archive? How can these and similar archival practices be Anthropocenic strategies? 

Project managers at the Army Corps of Engineers are not concerned with the Anthropocene. Their job at SLAPS and other FUSRAP sites revolves around a different contestable term: remediation. What exactly does Anthropocenic remediation look like in St. Louis? As the ACoE project managers informed us, remediation consists of removing contimated soil and shipping it to approved waste management sites in Michigan, Kentucky and Ohio. It would be interesting to further investigate how ACoE practices of remediation have historically been shaped.