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FIELDNOTE MAR 29 2023

We started our time at Naluwan with some morning dance moves to warm up our bodies. It was pleasant to see the elders actively participating in the exercise.

Fieldnote Apr 12 2023 - 1:34pm

For this visit, Juanjuan and I were grouped with five grandmothers, three from the previous visit and two new grandmothers due to the absence of our classmates.

Fieldnote Feb 21 2023 - 10:56pm

Driving through the small alley of the place where the Amis live felt odd as the modern view on my left - wind turbines, bridges, was a vast contrast from the view on my right which saw village-lik

Main argument

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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.

Scale and "Community"

kgupta
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Thinking through this article and Vermeylen's, something we might consider in ATX is how we conceptualize community itself. It is so easy in EJ-contexts to make communities our object of study and analysis, which can erase identities and exclusions within them...

How is ecological harm and gentrification experienced by LGBTQ people in Austin? Women? Etcetera? 

Energy and Race

kgupta
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What is the energy sector's relationship to racial capitalism? How is its current configuration shaped by legacies of settler colonialism, state bureaucracy, and corporate investment? 

Settler Colonialism in Texas

kgupta
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Environmental justice narratives in the U.S. often fall into "sacrifice zone" narratives that universalize experiences on the community-level, reproducing specifically bounded narratives about American lives and livelihoods, relationships to nature and capital, and the kinds of knowledge and authority that matter. Vermeylen's article disrupts this idea, rightfully arguing that environmental justice requires a more upfront confrontation with the socio-historical causes of oppression brought about by coloniality, as well as the fact that we need to question the righteousness of EJ discourses that rely on white settler logics.

For the Austin Field Campus, how can we bring attention to Anglo-American settler colonialism in our approaches to EJ and gentrification? And thinking back to the NOLA Field Campus, what Texas histories should we be drawing from to understand energy transitions in the city?