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Anonymous (not verified)
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Lee argues that EJ practice has long stagnated over an inability to properly define the concept of disproportionate (environmental and public health) impacts, but that national conversations on system racism and the development of EJ mapping tools have improved his outlook on the potential for better application of the concept of disproportionate impact. Lee identifies mapping tools (e.g. CalEnviroScreen) as a pathway for empirically based and analytically rigorous articulation and analysis of disproportionate impacts that are linked to systemic racism. In describing the scope and nature of application of mapping tools, Baker highlights the concept of cumulative impacts (the concentration of multiple environmental, public health, and social stressors), the importance of public participation (e.g. Hoffman’s community science model), the role of redlining in creating disproportionate vulnerabilities, and the importance of integrating research into decision making processes. Baker ultimately argues that mapping tools offer a promising opportunity for integrating research into policy decision making as part of a second generation of EJ practice. Key areas that Lee identifies as important to the continued development of more effective EJ practice include: identifying good models for quantitative studies and analysis, assembling a spectrum of different integrative approaches (to fit different contexts), connecting EJ research to policy implications, and being attentive to historical contexts and processes that produce/reproduce structural inequities.

Luísa Reis-Castro: mosquitoes, race, and class

LuisaReisCastro
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As a researcher, I’m interested in the political, ecological, and cultural debates around mosquito-borne diseases and the solutions proposed to mitigate them.

When we received the task, my first impulse was to investigate about the contemporary effects of anthropogenic climate change in mosquito-borne diseases in New Orleans. But I was afraid to make the same mistake that I did in my PhD research. I wrote my PhD proposal while based in the US, more specifically in New England, during the Zika epidemic, and proposed to understand how scientists were studying ecological climate change and mosquitoes in Brazil. However, once I arrived in the country the political climate was a much more pressing issue, with the dismantling of health and scientific institutions.

Thus, after our meeting yesterday, and Jason Ludwig’s reminder that the theme of our Field Campus is the plantation, I decided to focus on how it related to mosquitoes in New Orleans.

The Aedes aegypti mosquito and the yellow fever virus it can transmit are imbricated in the violent histories of settler-colonialism and slavery that define the plantation economy. The mosquito and the virus arrived in the Americas in the same ships that brought enslaved peoples from Africa. The city of New Orleans had its first yellow fever epidemic in 1796, with frequent epidemics happening between 1817 and 1905. What caused New Orleans to be the “City of the Dead,” as Kristin Gupta has indicated, was yellow fever. However, as historian Urmi Engineer Willoughby points out, the slave trade cannot explain alone the spread and persistance of the disease in the region: "Alterations to the landscape, combined with demographic changes resulting from the rise of sugar production, slavery, and urban growth all contributed to the region’s development as a yellow fever zone." For example, sugar cultivation created ideal conditions for mosquito proliferation because of the extensive landscape alteration and ecological instabilities, including heavy deforestation and the construction of drainage ditches and canals.

Historian Kathryn Olivarius examines how for whites "acclimatization" to the disease played a role in hierarchies with “acclimated” (immune) people at the top and a great mass of “unacclimated” (non-immune) people and how for black enslaved people "who were embodied capital, immunity enhanced the value and safety of that capital for their white owners, strengthening the set of racialized assumptions about the black body bolstering racial slavery."

As I continue to think through these topics, I wonder how both the historical materialities of the plantation and the contemporary anthropogenic changes might be influencing mosquito-borne diseases in New Orleans nowadays? And more, how the regions’ histories of race and class might still be shaping the effects of these diseases and how debates about them are framed?

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a_chen
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“Ushahidi provides open source crowdsourcing software for responding to crisis, helping human rights, and increasing transparency.”

For the event of post-election violence in Kenya 2008, map reports are created to flow the voices.

With the mobile apps (iOS/Android) of the system, data collection can gather other’s voice from multiple sources such as SMS, emails, Twitter and RSS. These data can also be managed and formed into visual charts and maps. Other functions such as alerts and customer services are also provided.

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a_chen
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The main method has used in this study by review the health profiles of the incarcerated group. Via this method, the basic background information can be gather and analyze with categorized people into different groups such age, races, gender etc. Furthermore, with group analyze some conclusion can be made to execute a possible solution to decrease the incarcerated people in order to improve health conditions. The health records are also useful to make prediction trend of the future environment, even though the conclusion from the prediction is the situation would not change as much as general publics and authorities expected.

By reviewing health profiles of the incarcerated group to study this issue, personally would say it is quite a quick and reliable way but not quite sure on the innovation level of this kind of methodology. Another issue with method is the possibility on the violation of personal information and ethical controversy. 

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a_chen
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  1. Patients: to get access with digital and gamified mental health assessments to diagnose themselves and gain self-awareness. After assessment, the patient might want get to a talk with the health professionals to have an ideal solution to the problem. Even by not getting frequent contacts with health professionals, the patients still can track their own health status with the system.
  2. Providers: will receive patients’ data and recorded into a dashboard data to view the profiles more efficiently. The dashboard function also allows the track on the history and current progress. Relevant assessment also can be send out to the patients regularly in order to assist both provider and patients to understand the situation more clearly.
  3. Organizations: organizations might include from a range of primary care center to hospital emergency room, with the data obtained from the patient, coordinated care can be provided. It is also a great tool to analysis the patients and form a study.