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Ina Kim

Ina

I am a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. I am working on my doctoral dissertation that explores post-disaster ecological imaginary shaped and performed through data practices in post-Fukushima Japan. My project examines how data practices of citizen radiation detection activities construct and reconfigure the understanding and experience of citizen scientists regarding post-Fukushima “Japan” as part of the ecosystem.  For further projects, I am also interested in the sociocultural role of small data in the era of big data and how small data that represent and intervene in environmental issues are intersected and interacted with big data in various domains. 

I am currently participating in the Transnational Disaster STS COVID-19 project and the COVID-19 and Data group as a subgroup of the project above. As a member of these groups, I am unraveling COVID-19 data practices and the relationships among multiple data actors such as the government, research institutions, media, and citizen scientists in Japan. I am also interested in how differently citizen data platforms have been gaining scientific and political authorities in Japan, the U.S., and South Korea during the pandemic.

I am particularly interested in these questions: 

  • What do different disciplines and communities involved in COVID-19 response mean by “good data”?

  • How do local, national, and global data intersect, interact, and compete with each other? 

  • What is shown and what is revealed or disregarded in COVID-19 data produced about different settings (a particular city, region, or country, for example)?

  • How are COVID-19 GIS data integrated with other data forms? What is the role of the GIS data in different COVID-19 settings?

  • What is the role of civic data as COVID-19 information in comparison to governmental or institutional data?

  • What do people expect from data within the COVID-19 pandemic? 

  • How is the data circulated for COVID-19 different from data produced in another pandemic period?

I can be contacted at inahk[at]uci.edu.

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Alexi Martin

" But with every explosion that shook the Japanese plant it became clear: there was nobody- not in Japan, nor Russia, nor the United States- who had the relevant know-how, equipment, and strategy to handle a nuclear disaster."

"To move forward with maximum efficiency, an international nuclear response group needs to operationalize realtive experiece from international disaster relief organizations."

"If an international nuclear response group is a worthwhile goal (and it certainly appears to be) we need to define realistic tasks."

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Alexi Martin

The study was perfomed by taking three groups of people from a diverse hospital in Brooklyn-patients, administrators and physicsans and asks them the same ballpark set of question about cultural competence. And how it affects a patient-physician relationship. This is not a new way of studying issues, case studies are quite a common way (in group questioning) to determine how "populations" feel about a topic.

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Alexi Martin

I followed up on the Fukushima 50 what they experienced, their lack of food and water. How they faded into the background after the event was over. The government nor the public realized the ramifications of what they had done and how they had saved them all from radiation. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jan/11/fukushima-50-kamika…

I followed up on emergency nuclear response groups if they did exist as a cause of Fukishima and came across the possibility of using robots in the place of humans in these situations. The robots could go where the humans could not saving life and limb.http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fukushima-disaster-inspires-b…

I finally looked up the statisitcs of how much cancer was prevelant in the population after the small doses of radiation to the villages surrounding Fukishima. It was interesting to find that there were more then expected and it could be a fluke due to overlooking scanning for Thyroid cancer in children in the past. There is also no definite way to prove these cancers were a direct cause of radiation or not.http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/mystery-cancers-are-cropping-chi…

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Alexi Martin

The three points that I looked up to further my understanding of the article were the PIH, how long it existed and its efforts were credible and successful in the treatment of facilitating the decrease and prevention of diease in rural areas. I looked up HIV/AIDS treatment in the US and found that up until recently, people could not afford treatment; this I found was in parallel with Hati- whose citizens could not have access to the medications they needed either. This surprised me, that a country with so much wealth, ignores its own citizens. The third point I looked up was structural violence to see if it was a credible term or if it was something made up by the author.

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Alexi Martin
Annotation of

The stakeholders of the film are wanting to be treated, but having to wait hours to be seen and maybe months afterwards for an appointment, even if their conditions are life threatening. Patients who are in severe pain may not have the option of surgury because they do not have a way to pay for it, or they cannot afford the medications for example. Each patient potrayed in the film did not have a job or had a job, but they could barely afford housing, let alone insurance. The patients needed to make decisions on whether they could deal with things on their own (like the man on dialysis who stated he would rather die then experience the wait again), or the man in his 20s who had the tumor on his testicle, who said he would find the money because he needed the treatment.

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Alexi Martin

Three points I looked up to further my  understanding was hand, foot and mouth disease because I was not familiar with it and it interested me. In my research I  found that it was spread easily and is common today-credible in health studies. I looked up Dark Winter to advance my understanding of the article. Through this search I found that the threat of biological weapons is very much an active threat and the US must be prepared, whether through vaccinations or research into global data on sickness. I finally looked up TB DOTS.  I found that it was a strategy to stop the spread of a TB epidemic: through attacking it quickly with a cure to those infected.. It also supported the article’s idea of global health security.