Following the article, the author J. Kenens has published another paper "Changing perspectives: tracing the evolution of citizen radiation measuring organizations after Fukushima (2020)" DOI: 10.1051/radiopro/2020041 (link) that draws on the research on citizen science in Japan with a new focus on the comparison of their practices directly after the nuclear accident and today.
It is interesting to see how citizen science in Japan is enacted and how the concept of citizen science is dependent to the social and cultural context. Also looking at it not only from a top-down perspective, where universities or organizations are involved, but also the bottom-up perspective that includes only those practices that are done by citizens alone opens up a new space. As I am currently engaging with research on air pollution in different sites, I could build from this text in considering the link between "citizen-driven approaches and institutional imparatives in the governance" (p. 7) of issues with air pollution.
The text is an article about citizen science in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster in 2011. The first noteworthy detail about this text that struck me is the inclusion of Japanese words and even their original spelling. This creates a kind of closeness to the field that the authors did their research in.
The authors engaged in multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork that took place in and around Fukushima but also in other geografical sites like Tochigi, Miyagi, Aichi, Tokyo and Kyoto. There, they conduct semi-structured interviews with various organisations that are all somehow involved with citizen science or radiation measurement. To learn about the citizens that measure radioactivity and create their own data on radiation because of a lack of provided data by the government, a literature review of policy documents and workshops with those citizen scientists is performed.
The report is provided with both English and Japanese for the technical professionals to study. For the general publics, this report summary (fact sheet) has provided in six major languages to assist them to gained a broad understanding to the works.
The system built organisational partnerships with world leading foundations that focusing on advancing human rights, citizen engagement, international development etc. These organisations included CISCO, google.org, USAID etc.
In this article, the main agencies been depicted are the local publics and the health centers. From the reports, Guinea medical centers and aid works are the main targets that received violence acts and harassments from the general publics. Whereas the publics have the perception that aid workers such as doctors and nurses are the transporters of the virus within the local communities.
From the “At a Glance.pdf”, OSHA covers a wide range of works from private sector works (including 50 states and other US jurisdictions), states and local government workers that operate their programs to federal government workers.
But their do have some types of workers that are not eligible for the act protection such as self-employed workers, immediate family members of farm employers and workplace hazards regulated by another federal agency (e.g. Mine Safety and Health Administration). [https://www.osha.gov/Publications/all_about_OSHA.pdf]
Funding was not mentioned in the study, but from the author’s relevant background information, personally would assume the study could found by The Miriam Hospital (The Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights; www.prisonerhealth.org) and CFAR (nationwide Centers for AIDS Research). [https://vivo.brown.edu/display/jrichmph]