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My own research

ajr387

I will consider the impacts of retrofitting, rennovations, and weatherization in new terms now. A "just" transition will be at the forefront of my mind when considering the impacts of green energy in Philadelphia. Gentrification is already a massive issue in Philadelphia, and I had considered how green energy may play into it, but now I have models, like the Yansa model, which offer ways for a green transition to benefit the community at large. On top of this, I can now relate capital and biopower into this transition better, with detailed examples as seen in the book.

I good example of biopower in the book is how the extractive nature that is a requirement for oil and fossil fuel bussiness has translated into wind, despite not being a requirement. In Philadelphia, we have seen something similar with solarize Philadelphia. I do not have the exact details right now, but I remember a plan for a community based building for solar panels running into issues. I would like to reanalyze that and compare it to wind farms in Mexico.

Main argument

ajr387

At the end of the book, the authors state "in our view, there will be no 'renewable energy transition' worth having without a more holistic reimagination of relations in which we avoid simply greening the predatory and accumulative enterprises of modern statecraft and capitalism." A great example of this is the Ixtepec wind farm. Yansa's plan was a new model for Mexico, one in which the authors show full support for because it reduces the extractiveness and exploititiveness of the current wind farm plans. Other chapters in the book talk about how only landowners seem to benefit from wind farms, which is something the Yansa plan was hoping to address.

Questions and Frustration

ajr387

I'm curious to see how the wind farms turned out. On top of this, I feel like the book didn't go into as much technical detail on how wind farms work, but I suppose this is something I will have to research on my own. I would love to learn more about the culture of the indiginous groups as well, maybe more specific details about non land owning residents. I think details on how the interviews were conducted could have helped aid us in our own interviews. Overall, I was not left with too many questions, but the ones above are important.

Energy and COVID-19

ajr387

Energy is still seen as something we all need. The lights must say on, even under COVID-19, a national crisis with no end in sight, our current levels of energy consumption must remain the same. COVID-19 has not caused people to ask fundamental questions like "why do we use so much energy, do we need to? what even is energy?" We had even failed to do this to some extent. Electric companies offer payment options and plans, but their relationship to their customer has not fundamentally changed under COVID-19.

Building our survey based off this book

ajr387

The main way I will use this text in our future survey project is when crafting questions about energy. Our previous energy survey was built without an understanding of how "energy" came to be. We didn't question the fundamentals of how our understanding of energy came to be. Now that we have this knowledge, I think we can ask questions that get people to think about energy. Simple questions like "what is energy" and "why is energy important to your life" can serve to test some of the books claims. We can see if people think of energy like the book states: the ability to do work and some scientific measurement of that ability.

Marx's idea of a ruling ideas

ajr387

This text builds off of Marx's concept of the ruling idea. According to Marx, many concepts and ideas that are embedded as "common sense" in our society today exist to profilerate and benefit the ruling class. The book builds of this theory in multiple ways. For example, we view coal as one of, if not the only viable ways to power our sociey because the characteristics of coal most benefit the ruling class. It does not require communual effort like water and can be used all year round. On top of this, the way energy and work are intertwined also benefits the working class. We think of those that don't work as wasting their energy, when in reality they show that people do not need to work in the capitalistic sense of the word.

The biggest example of this is the scientific study of energy and entropy. The first two laws of thermodynamics somewhat contradict each other, but play into this idea that the earth is under our control. The second is even used to often justify forcing people into work, stating that if they waste energy, they cannot reuse it.

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Andreas_Rebmann

They also have a fantastic list of these on their website:

Alliance for Global Justice is an organization that seeks to achieve social change and economic justice by helping to build a stronger more unified grassroots movement.

Arts and Democracy builds the momentum of a growing movement that links arts and culture, participatory democracy, and social justice.

Cowbird is a community of storytellers and the beautiful platform that we partnered with to collect and display stories in our first year.

Coney Island Generational Gap is a youth group in Coney Island that organizes work programs, arts opportunities and media courses for more than one hundred youth in the neighborhood.

El Centro is a storefront immigrant day worker center in Port Richmond, Staten Island.

Housing is a Human Right is a creative storytelling project that aims to help connect diverse communities around housing, land, and the dignity of a place to call home.

Interoccupy.Net fosters communication across the Occupy movement.

Land of Opportunity is an ongoing trans-media documentary that captures the struggle to rebuild New Orleans, one of America’s most beloved and emblematic cities. We partnered with Land of Opportunity on Katrina/Sandy.

New York Public Library has been an essential provider of free books, information, ideas, and education for all New Yorkers for more than 100 years.

New York Writers Coalition provides free creative writing workshops throughout New York City for people from groups that have been historically deprived of voice in our society.

Occupy Sandy is a mutual aid network responding to the ongoing crisis in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

Parsons: New School for Design has been a pioneer in art and design higher education since its founding in 1896.

Project Hope offered free and confidential supportive counseling and public education services to Hurricane Sandy disaster survivors in New York City and Nassau, Suffolk, Rockland, and Westchester Counties in the immediate aftermath of the storm.

Research Action Design (RAD) uses community-led research, transformative media organizing, technology development, and collaborative design to build the power of grassroots social movements.

The Beacon School is a public magnet high school on the Upper West Side that offers an inquiry-based college preparatory program with technology and arts infused throughout the curriculum.

The Hudson School is a private school in Hoboken, New Jersey, that provides intellectually inquisitive students in grades 5-12 with a rigorous and relevant college-preparatory education.

The MIT Center for Civic Media works hand in hand with diverse communities to collaboratively create, design, deploy, and assess civic media tools and practices–including the text and phone technology that Sandy Storyline uses.

YANA (You Are Never Alone) is a worker training center and hurricane relief hub in Rockaway Park.

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Andreas_Rebmann

"At this point, the burden of mental disorders after disasters has been well documented, and interest in the course of trajectory of psychological symptoms following disasters is growing."

"Persons who live in a community where a disaster hsa occured may differ in their degree of exposure in the event. They may be affected directly, being present at the disaster site, or indirectly, having loved ones present at the disaster site or seeing images of the disaster in the media."

"Ongoing stressors such as job loss, property damage, marital stress, physical health conditions related to the disaster, and displacement are often experienced by those affected by the disaster... Low levels of and reductions in social support are also associated iwth post-disaster psychological symptoms."

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Andreas_Rebmann

Byron J. Good, the author of this book is currently a professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard, with his research focusing on mental health services development in Asian societies, particularly in Indonesia. He has done collaborative work with the International Organization for Migration on developing mental health services in post-tsunami and post-conflict Aceh, Indonesia. More broadly, he works on the theorization of subjectivity in contemporary societies.