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CITIZEN SCIENCE

Epistemic negotiation

Stakeholders (indigenous groups, activist, scientist, scholars, etc)

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?

Sonja D Schmid. She is an assistant professer in Science and Technology Studies at Virginia Tech. She studies the history of nuclear energy and the decisions governments make around nuclear power. Due to her background of studies, she appears to be a trustable source.

She has discussed responses to nuclear disasters, however she has no on the field background that I could find. She is on a CERT team but thats not in the field.

“During our interviews in Turkey, many of the conversations we had - with those suffering seizures, with family members, persons in the community, and health care providers - were made up largely of stories. We were told stories of the sudden and shocking onset of seizures or fainting, of particularly dramatic episodes of seizures or extended loss of consciousness, of years of efforts in which families and individuals engaged in a quest to find a cure, of especially memorable interactions with physicians and with religious healers, and of experiences at work, with friends, and, for example, in marriage negotiations that were influenced by the illness.”

“The same issue was raised in our attempts to elicit a "history" of the illness _ again, a problem shared by physicians who attempt to elicit a clinical history. The stories we heard were life stories, and the temporal structure was organized around events of importance to individuals and families.”

“Narrative is a form in which experience is represented and recounted, in which events are presented as having a meaningful and coherent order, in which activities and events are described along with the experiences associated with them and the significance that lends them their sense for the persons involved. But experience always far exceeds its description or narrativization.”

Dr. John Watson, the primary author of this study, works for WHO as a medical epidemiologist with the Disease Control in Humanitarian Emergencies Program (this program is the one providing technical and operational support for the study). In his work, he particularly studies respiratory disease and tuberculosis, focusing on surveillance, prevention and control. He is a Chairman of the International Society for Influenza.