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Tanya Matthan: environmental justice and epistemic violence

tanyamatthan

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?

Tanya Matthan: BRT and envt justice

tanyamatthan

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?

Tanya Matthan: envtl politics of reproduction

tanyamatthan

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?

Tanya Matthan: Walsh and Austin's environmental history

tanyamatthan

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?

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tamar.rogoszinski

OSHA covers most private sector employers and their workers. They also cover some public sector employers and workers in the US and other territories under federal authority. Those districts include DC, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and other islands as well. 

Workers at state and local government agencies are not covered by federal OSHA, but have OSH Act protections if they work in states that have an OSHA-approved state program. OSHA also permits states and territories to develop plans that cover only public sector (state and local government) workers. In these cases, private sector workers and employers remain under federal OSHA jurisdiction.OSHA’s protection applies to all federal agencies and does not cover self-employed individuals.

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tamar.rogoszinski

I researched,

  1. what actually caused the collapse of the World Trade Centers
  2. John Ripley Freeman and the creation of Underwriters Laboratories. 
  3. The Hague Street Explosion

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tamar.rogoszinski

The data presented is from governmental texts, but we do not have a bibliography to assess. However, from the references and quotations made within the chapter, I can deduce that Fassin did a lot of research using extensive resources to gather information for this chapter.