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Pödelwitz is an activist initiative  in the central german coal district, which is located in a village which was supposed to be evacuated for a planned expansion of a neighboring coal mine. After successfully resisting this expansion, the activists now promote social-ecological transformation in the village and the wider region. I will collaborate with them as part of my project in C-urge to study the role of justice in such transformations. Thereby we hope to arrive at an understanding of justice that is not opposed to urgent societal transformation in light of climate change, but a means of achieving this.

The purpose of this program is to educate students to become global leaders (dubbed Phoenix Leaders) in radiation disaster response. The program aims to use experience from the aftermath for Hiroshima to create an overarching program of “Radiation Disaster Recovery Studies”, with multiple disciplines of Medicine, Environmental Studies, Engineering, Sciences, Sociology, Education and Psychology. The eventual aim is to create a new and evolving system of response, safety, and security. 

There doesn’t seem to be much coverage for the program, and it is pretty obscure outside of academia.

The membership is mostly volunteers. Anyone who volunteers to donate blood, work at a center, or provide care is automatically a member of the organization as a whole. Of course, they have employees as well to provide professional care services and the organization is governed by a board as well as a CEO and President. 

"'In the globalized world of the 21st Century,'... simply stopping disease at national borders is not adequate"

"Early advocates of such [biodefense] efforts...argued that adequate preparation for a biological attack would require a massive infusion of resources into both biomedical research and public health response capacity" 

"Security experts and some life scientists worry that existing biosafety protocols focused on material controls in laboratories will not be sufficient as techniques of genetic manipulation become more powerful and routine, and as expertise in molecular biology becomes increasingly widespread."

"In all of them, we find that health experts, policy advocates, and politicians have competing visions about how to characterize the problem of biosecurity and about what constitutes the most appropriate response. Thus, the question is not just whether certain events (or potential events) have been characterized as "biosecurity" threats that require attention; we also need to ask what kind of biosecurity problem they are seen to pose, what techniques are used to assess them, and how certain kinds of responses to them are justified" 

The 1814 burning of the Captiol Building was in response to the American's burning fown York. The British decided to return the favor and burn down the captiol buildings and other cities in the Union. The building itslef had structural issues with poor ventilation, rotting timbers, and leaking roofs. In the efforts to reconstruct the capitol building, the engineer was met with public criticism, which could be considered out of line to an expert. He stated that the buildings left from the fire were already doomed, regardless of the fire's destruction. Other questions were brought by the public after the fire, such as the defense of the capitol and the war of 1812 itself. The engineer, Latrobe, conducted his own "investigation" of the buildings. In the end, the investiagtion revealed that the public was not as concerned with the how, but more the reasons why. 

In 1850 , a boiler exploded in the basement of a printing press factory in Manhattan. The diasaster led to a number of workers, notable children and adults alike, being trapped in the rubble in need of rescue. These rescue attempts were repeatedly halted in order to put out emerging fires around the explosion site. The total death toll was 67, with an additonal 50 injured. Seventeen jurors were brought to the site to observe the boiler (what remained of it) for its strength and fitness for use. Out of all the witnesses called forward for questioning on the boiler's fitness, numerous named any number of issues, specific to their area of expertise. The engineer who designed the boiler stated it was not properly constructed wiht numerous defects. The maker of the boiler had examined the boiler and found cracks prior to the explosion. The end result of the investiagtion revealed that the public had a fair amount of knowledge on the workings and issues with boilers. The incident also effected change in the inspection policies. 

The Iroquois Theater Fire happened in part due to the design of the theater and in part from the mistakes of the managers of the building. Exits were blocked or locked. The investigation revealed that the inspections of the theater were never truly enforced and many things did not meet code (such as fire sprinklers placement). The public, in this case, played a crucial role in pushing for a public investiagtion of the Iroquois, and other theaters. 

"... pathology, which previously aroused suspicion, has therefore become a source of social recognition"

"The issuing of a diagnosis and prognosis- an every-day act for the clinician, in principle involving no difficulties other than technical ones- became a problem of conscience that seemed like to invovle ideological of ethical issues" 

"The logic of state sovereignty in the control of immigration clearly prevailed over the universality of the priciple of the right to life. The compassion protocol had met its limit" 

The article was mainly backed by statistical evidence and cited other reesearch articles and studies. The authors, I assume, used their own extensive backgrounds in the field to support their arguments and views.