Search

1619 Project

ramah
Annotation of
In response to

This may not be the right place to post/share this, and I am happy to delete or move it! But I wanted to make a plug for the 1619 Project, and this post in particular, as helpfully complementing some of the other readings (such as McKittrick and Moore et al) on America's plantation history.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capital…

Hazardous waste work, race, and making disaster "professions"

ramah
Annotation of
In response to
I began my research for these field notes by thinking about what kind of labor becomes available in the context of disaster relief/climate change? In my teaching this week, I have been talking about Cyclone Idai and mold as an example of one of how disasters unfold over different temporalities, as in Kim’s work, and via ‘aftershocks’ (Bonilla and Lebron 2019). Thinking about mold got me googling respiratory infections/respiratory health in New Orleans, which lead me to various sites that offer hazardous waste worker training programs (including under the auspices of environmental justice/community development work - e.g. http://www.dscej.org/our-work). This seems one example, among others, of how exposure to environmental harm is transformed into new sites of professionalization. This called to mind discussions of risky labor in the context of disaster, such as in Fortun 2001 or Petryna 2002, and to the centrality of respiration to thinking about anthropocenic processes (Kenner 2019). It highlighted how that transformation of geographical exposure into professional opportunity is then refracted via race and class; while some become hazardous waste clean up experts, others become climate change experts and professionals, who deploy expertise in the wake of other storms. Other accounts (https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2018/03/06/meet-the-refugees-fighting-for-the-future-of-new-orleans/) highlighted specific communities, such as refugee communities, as key sites of resistance to energy infrastructures including a new gas plant, which is being constructed in a FEMA-designated high-risk flood zone. This short stint of googling also lead me to a number of studies of respiratory health, many using spirometric readings to calculate the impact of exposure (for instance to remediation workers involved in cleaning after Hurricane Katrina) (eg. Rando et al 2012). Having recently read Lundy Braun’s book about race and spirometry (2014), these accounts highlighted for me how racialization is built into these processes in multiple ways: not only does race (along with class, professional background, geographical situation, etc) shape who is exposed and in what ways, it also shapes the how health and harm are measured and made visible in this context.Reference:Rando, Roy, John Lefante, Laurie Freyder, & Robert Jones. 2012. Journal of Environmental and Public Health. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jeph/2012/462478/

Where/whether to place human mobility in thinking anthropocenically

ramah
Annotation of
In response to
Is there a place for thinking about the relationship between the governance of human mobility and anthropogenic processes in Louisiana? Reading the Andy Horowitz piece about Hurricane Harvey and the McKittrick piece about plantations got me thinking about the governance of human mobility as central to how New Orleans, and especially storms, are narrated. The ways in which mobility is made possible or impeded are central to ’storm narratives’. At the same time, recent news has highlighted how ICE activities have been concentrated in Mississippi, Louisiana, and other parts of the South. As the Southern Poverty Law Center notes, "The South is both a destination for new immigrants seeking security in the U.S. and a staging ground for deportation.” Louisiana - although perhaps not New Orleans - seems to be a key site in which these processes are visible. For instance, a report on NBC suggested that, “the number of detainees in facilities contracted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Louisiana and Mississippi surged from just over 2,000 at the end of 2017 to more than 8,000 as of July. That’s nearly four times as many as were detained in the two states in November 2017, the numbers show. Louisiana, with a population of more than 6,500, now has the largest population of ICE detainees of any single state apart from Texas.” One reason for this increase in numbers is financial. According to the SPLC, "The South, which already has some of the highest rates of incarceration in the country, is the bargain basement of immigration detention. Facilities charge among the lowest per diem rates in the country in order to land Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracts that can create jobs for communities, revenue for municipalities and profits for private prison operators, no matter the long-term cost. It’s an approach that flows from the South’s long history of looking to prisons filled mostly with people of color as a way to build local economies – a history that includes chain gangs and programs that “leased” prisoners to companies for work. Today, immigrant detention is but the latest chapter in that history” https://www.splcenter.org/20161121/shadow-prisons-immigrant-detention-south). Yet as this quote suggests, this mode of detention is also historical, and that history seems to play out in a number of ways. Facilities used to detain migrants have often also been used as prisons (including the La Salle detention center in Jena, Louisiana), for instance. But it seems that tensions around the notion of New Orleans as a "city of refuge” (Munyikwa 2019) are long-standing. Even as today, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports highlighted Cuban immigrants/asylum seekers, so too are tensions over racialized Caribbean migration longstanding. In the aftermath of the Haitian revolution, New Orleans was a kind of “flashpoint” (Kazanjian 2003) for tensions over migration and race as both French settlers from Haiti fled to Louisiana and as Afro-Creole refugees were expelled from Cuba. One report of the 1809 migration describes how “in Louisiana, as lawmakers moved to suppress manumission and undermine the free black presence, the refugees dealt a serious blow to their efforts.” http://www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/topic.cfm;jsessionid=f8302584551566978728483?migration=5&topic=3&bhcp=1 These are all clumsy linkages, and I’m not sure I want to draw historical analogies across contexts about which I have only cursory knowledge, but it seems to me that there are linkages or repetitions of connections between labor, environment, and human mobility that for me provoke questions about the relationship between anthropocenics and regimes of human mobility and carcerality (beyond just the notion of ‘climate refugees’). Resources consulted: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/ice-detainments-surge-mississippi-louisiana-alarming-immigration-advocates-n1042696 Southern Poverty Law Center & National Lawyers’ Guildhttps://www.splcenter.org/20161121/shadow-prisons-immigrant-detention-southhttps://www.splcenter.org/news/2019/04/10/cuban-men-thrown-louisiana-prisons-despite-legal-asylum-requests http://www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/topic.cfm;jsessionid=f8302584551566978728483?migration=5&topic=3&bhcp=1 https://www.theadvocate.com/gambit/new_orleans/news/the_latest/article_8687dfba-a127-5bb9-9635-25502c2916dc.html https://nolapsc.org/human-rights/ Munyikwa, Michelle. 2019. ‘Up from the dirt’: Racializing Refuge, Rupture, and Repair in Philadelphia. Dissertation submitted to the Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania. 

Creating a mobile disaster industry

ramah
Annotation of
In response to
I haven’t gone as deeply into this as I’d like, but I started by trying to find out which private firms/actors were associated with disaster response in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (beyond the groups, like Blackwater, that made headlines). What I actually found was the way in which New Orleans- and Louisiana-based firms and individuals are positioning themselves as disaster experts (or, as seems to be the preferred language, experts in resiliency and preparedness) in the wake of Katrina and subsequent storms (e.g. Isaac). So, groups involved in the initial response include companies like Beck Disaster Relief, AshBritt, Shaw Group, Korte, Fluor, Halliburton spin-offs, and Akima site contractors, but these groups have also used Katrina to position themselves or consolidate their position as disaster relief specialists. Other organizations, like Greater New Orleans Inc (GNO), Royal Engineers, Hammerman and Garner International and others, expanded from local contracting or civic bodies to national or international actors, as experience navigating not only the material landscape of Katrina but also the bureaucratic and financial landscape of FEMA became a selling point for further projects — for instance, many of these organizations went on to bid for public contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and subsequent preparedness activities. If these firms point to a genealogy of expertise spooling forward from Katrina, there are also financial genealogies that predate the privatized response to Katrina — for instance, the way Housing and Urban Development’s community development block grants (CDBGs), originally designed to promote “urban revitalization” became used as disaster relief funds. I also have not included here the key role played by humanitarian agencies and NGOs, both nationally and overseas.The other way I’ve been preparing for the Field Campus is by thinking about the stakes of claiming - in my own work or in the work of these firms - New Orleans (and especially a mass-mediated event like Katrina) as a site for authorizing and producing knowledge. To that end, thinking with Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds, and Tina Campt’s work on refusal has been helpful, since these authors are concerned in part with how the hypervisibility of Black suffering underpins so much of American political life, and locate Katrina as part of that; those texts are helping me to start thinking about what possible starting points for my thinking might exist in relation to this analytical/geographical/empirical anthropocenic space.Some media accounts and reports:https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/08/secret-history-hurricane-katrina/https://corpwatch.org/article/katrina-contractors-rake-it-they-clean-ithttps://iem.comhttps://www.nola.gov/community-development/documents/isaac-recovery-program/action-plan-amendments/cno-isaac-action-plan-amend-1/https://capitalresearch.org/article/private-sector-disaster-relief/https://resconnola.com

The Red Spot

The 2008 financial crisis was one of the biggest shifts of wealth away from the Black community.

pece_annotation_1476026860

Sara.Till
Annotation of
In response to

The web platform appears to be a space to compile stories and information from Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. The primary goal seems to be informing the public about the hurricanes, specifically the aftermath in the days and months following the flooding. It serves as a method of remembrance for what occurred (the flooding, death toll, lack of appropriate and timely response, the struggles of survivors) and as a way to warn that these problems will continue to occur in the future. In the last few days, Hurricane Matthew ravaged the Caribbean, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. It will take weeks to return power to all who have lost it, and exact damage tolls will take months to compile. Although each time, with each pass of destruction, our responses seem to be improving, the disasters continue to accumulate-- despite warnings such as this site. 

pece_annotation_1477262149

Sara.Till
Annotation of
In response to

According to NCBI, this report has been cited 40 times by various other reports. This includes several longitudinal studies, a piece detailing climate change and public health, and several more review articles detailing overarching effects of disasters. Additionally, it has been cited in several shorter pieces focusing on specific disaster events and their subsequent effects on specific populations-- such as the effects of Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the physical health of adult women in So Louisiana. 

pece_annotation_1478466084

Sara.Till
Annotation of
In response to

The film stands very well on its own. As a biology major with particular interest in human physiology, I would have liked to see more information on what defects/cancers/diseases are most prevalent with the listed contaminants. Moreover, chronic illness from contaminated water could also demonstrate harsh effects on renal and circulatory systems; these were not discussed during the film nor were we provided with any links to studies demonstrating coincidence between VOM's and specific illnesses. 

pece_annotation_1479066419

Sara.Till
Annotation of
In response to

1) early on the article, Dr. Good discuses how individuals would use the word "fainting" to described their tonic-clonic seizure episodes. This was quite divergent from the word "epilepsy" in Turkish, thus allowing the patient to distance themselves from the well-stigmatized diagnosis of epilepsy. It also served as a point of reference for what linguistic nuances could be expected during the course of the interview, as these can play a great deal into the narrative.

2) Dr. Good also discusses the work of Dr. Evelyn Early, who interviewed members of the Turkish female population. His description of Dr. Early's work states these narratives “allow the women she studied to develop an interpretation of the illness in relation to a local explanatory logic and the biographic context of the illness, to negotiate right action in the face of uncertainty, and to justify actions taken, thus embedding the illness and therapeutic efforts within local moral norms".

3) Dr. Good includes the story of Zeki Bey, an individual with generalized seizures for 15 years at the time of interaction. Dr. Good describes his narrative of his illness as being "[told with] immediacy, drama, and poignancy... His illness had a powerful and meaningful beginning, which gave shape and coherence to the larger narrative."

pece_annotation_1480271412

Sara.Till
Annotation of
In response to

Emergency response itself is not particularly addressed; the article, instead, focuses on the humanitarian efforts that typically spawn from multi-week and month long conflicts. These are not necessarily the first-line individuals, but rather the workers (such as MSF) which come in to provide aid in the middle, late, or final stages of a conflict. The report delves into the responsibilities and hurdles of dealing with sexual violence in humanitarian efforts, which includes both emergent and non-emergent care.