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Mutual Aid/Best Practices vs Local Practices

_jzhao

This image reminds me of how mutual aid and communities keep each other fed, and safe, and how local practices are actually best practices. My own research, although not immediatley related to the specific public health concern of COVID, will focus on Indigenous food soverignty, particularly the right and autonomy to ferment and distribute alcohol (紅糯米酒) within the Amis community, and their current fight with the local health department on declaring whether or not their alcohol is "safe" for public consumption and distribution.

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tamar.rogoszinski
  1. "One might be tempted to see this as a medically virtuous circle, ... but one has to be conscious that it institutes the body as the immigrant's site of ultimate truth."
  2. "These represent two contrasting approaches to the doctor's civic responsibility. However contradictory, the differing positions nevertheless reveal, each in its own way, how these professionals situated their medical expert opinion in a political space where the deontological points of reference had becommed blurred."
  3. "...the organic importance of the body, is, basically, nothing more than the importance of the body as organ, or in other words, first as labor power, and only then as a form of self-presentation."
  4. "....era in which demand for foreign labor made immigration a social necessity seems now so remote, the immigrant's body was entirely legitimized through its function as an instrument of production, the performance of which was interrupted by illness or accident."

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tamar.rogoszinski

The argument is supported through various anecdotes and testimonials. The authors use quotes from various victims in order to highlight the ways in which they were affected by Katrina. Notably, Sally, a 56-year-old woman from St. Bernard Parish who was still living in a FEMA trailer 50 miles from her original residence 2 1/2 years after the storm was interviewed. She talks about the living conditions post-Katrina. She describes families being torn apart, the National Guard using unnecessary force, and dead bodies floating in the water. The authors also use statistics and facts in order to back up their point about the horrendous conditions the survivors were in post-Katrina. A psychological and anthropological analysis also helps strengthen their argument regarding chronic disaster syndrome.

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tamar.rogoszinski
  1. "First, disasters threaten harm or death to a large group of people, regardless of the actual extent of lives lost (48). Second, they affect social processes, causing disruption of services and social networks and communal loss of resources (42, 50). Third, they involve secondary consequences, namely identifiable mental and physical health outcomes, among those affected"
  2. "Having the capacity to continue functioning after a traumatic event is common and characteristic of normal coping and adaptation"
  3. "The key functions of pre-disaster preparation efforts are to prevent or minimize exposure to potentially traumatic disaster-related events and reduce likelihood of additional post-disaster stressors, which are both associated with post-disaster mental disorders."

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tamar.rogoszinski

The main point of this article is that efforts to restore and rebuild Haiti have not been done as they should have been. Despite the donations received to help, none of the funds have been used appropriately to transform Haiti. The lack of responsible spending has caused the transformation to halt and rebuilding efforts to fail. The ways in which organizations are spendng their money is irresponsble and wasteful. As a result, the current status of the country is not at all where it should have been. Also, the UN brought cholera with them, which has killed over 9,000 Haitians, for which they are not taking any responsibility.