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.
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joerene.avilesThe author is Scott Gabriel Knowles, an Associate Professor and Department Head at Drexel University. He specializes in the history of technology, disasters, and public policy. His work looks at the policies and technologies created for emergency response.
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joerene.avilesVincanne Adams is a professor at the UCSF School of Medicine with research done in global health, critical medical anthropology, and Asian medical systems among other topics. Taslim Van Hattum is an artist and social worker, and is currently Director of the Maternal and Child Health Portfolio at the Louisiana Public Health Institute. Diana English is an Assistant Clinical Professor of gynecologic oncology at Stanford Hospital. She has published research on uterine serous carcinoma, but also participates in community/ international service in developing countries.
When it comes to emergency response, they deal with the populations that are most affected by disasters or are socially/ economically disadvantaged and are more often in need of EMS.
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joerene.aviles1. Arguably, the new Ukrainian accounting of the Cherobyl unknown was part and parcel of the government's strategies for "knowledge-based" governance and social mobilization. In 1991 and in its first set of laws, the new parliament denounced the Soviet management of Chemobyl as "an act of genocide."
2. On the one hand, the Ukrainian government rejected Western neoliberal prescriptions to downsize its social welfare domain; on the other hand, it presented itself as informed by the principles of a moder risk society. On the one hand, these Chernobyl laws allowed for unprecedented civic organizing; on the other hand, they became distinct venues of corruption through which informal practices of providing or selling access to state privileges and protections (blat) expanded.
3. Government-operated radiation research clinics and non- governmental organizations mediate an informal economy of illness and claims to a "biological citizenship"-a demand for, but limited access to, a form of social welfare based on medical, scientific, and legal criteria that recognize injury and compensate for it.
Law does more than codify, regulate, and control; it also catalyzes and transmutes, provoking cascading social and cultural effects, particularly when the force of law is informational.