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St. Louis Anthropocene: displacement & replacement

JJP

A brief essay about St. Louis' notorious eminent domain history--

--along with 2 recent St. Louis Post-Dispatch articles about "urban renewal" projects that are scheduled to reoccupy the Mill Flats area, which hosted the most notorious episode of displacement of African-American communities: the Chouteau Greenway project (will it serve or displace low-income St. Louisans?); and SLU's Mill Creek Flats high-rise project, which certainly will, and whose name seems to me an especially tone-deaf if gutsy move...

https://humanities.wustl.edu/features/Margaret-Garb-St-Louis-Eminent-Domain

https://www.stltoday.com/business/local/steelcote-developer-plans-more-apartments-brewery-space-in-million-midtown/article_811eaf96-76e1-5c20-a870-1e79abd3f06e.html

https://www.stltoday.com/business/local/chouteau-greenway-project-aims-to-knit-st-louis-neighborhoods-together/article_55fea4e6-6829-5c80-9168-313305b4e3bb.html

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Zackery.White

Doctors Without Borders comes with a unique aspect of non-bias for the people they give care. Just as a hospital should have no bias, MSF has no religious affiliation, pays no attention to social classes and does not participate in political battles. This lack of bias allows for the most effect when administering emergency patient care. 

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Zackery.White

This article is supported with the following:

- Anecdotes from survivors whom have experienced the turmoil of living in the remains after Katrina.

- Showing the disproportional treatment of individuals based on wealth. Those wealthy enough are able to relocate, but those who live in poverty are less likely able to relocate and forced to live in subpar conditions.

- Showing price gouging done by private companies in order to gain funds from federal funding.

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Zackery.White

The article uses data from sources such as the Aid Worker Security Database, interviews and focus groups. The Aid Worker Security Database, as aforementioned, produces very little data in comparison to how large the problem is suspected to be. 

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Zackery.White
  • "My argument is that while humanitarianism, in conjunction with certain feminist movements, may work to medicalise and depoliticise gender-based violence, the politics of gender actually creep back in undercover, revealing problems at the heart of the humanitarian mission – problems that undermine the very idea of a ‘humanitarian space’ critical to humanitarian action, that is, a space that tries to temporarily hold the political at bay."
  • "MSF argued in their essays on the Congo that one reason for not taking rape seriously was that women who had experienced sexual assualt were not ideal subjects of aid; since they could not be easily identified with images of innocence."
  • "I argue that the shift to gender-based violence as the exemplary humanitarian problem could not have happened without the prior move to medicalise gender-based violence, and render it a medical condition like all others."

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Zackery.White

The three quotations that more capture the message of the article are: 

"Regardless of the specific national roadmaps, however, nuclear safety has returned to the international stage with a vengence." - I love the use of 'vengence' because it's such a powerful descriptor.

"Numerous case studieshave documented that meaningfully engaging lay communities in decisions... enable greater vigilence and raise confidence about individual emergency preparedness."

"The real challenge of a disaster involving nuclear facilities lies in how to handle the unexpected, unpredictible, utterly novel, and barely intelligible chain of events unfolding in real time."