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1619 Project

ramah
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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
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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
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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
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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

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Sara_Nesheiwat
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The article is supported through the use of numerous examples and educated points made by the author. First, the author supports her arguments by going through the events that transpired that day at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. She uses the details of the events in Japan to support her argument that a global emergency nuclear response team is necessary. Schmid also cites other areas in the world where this was an issue and protocols were not clear. Ultimately which caused the incidences at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, all of which would have benefited from a response team equipped and specially trained to deal with this type of situation. The author cites that incidences at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were the result of systems that were too complex, tightly coupled  and technical, ultimately not allowing broad policy changes when needed. The author also cites that this occurred in one of the world's most advanced areas in the world, both technologically and economically. She states that having scientists and the elite left to make decisions about responses to disasters alone further proves her point and supports her arguments. She also notes that current organizations have little international authority and often suffer when attempting to include or talk to the public in terms of these situation which doesn't allow for full integration with the public. She notes the importance of this integration, but also that world leaders are attempting to do so and see how beneficial this is. She compared the way previous situations similar to that in Japan was handled and she mapped out new regulations that arose based off each of those incidences in order to see what can further be implemented as a blanket response globally for all nations in a situation like this.

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Sara_Nesheiwat
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The authors support their argument many ways, one being how that the rates of HIV/AIDS are so positively linked and correlated with social arrangements that it is often referred to as social disease. HIV commonly effects those that are poor and disease rates are fueled by gender inequality, racism and poverty. The article discusses how structural violence has influenced HIV progression. The article cites that structural violence influences diagnosis rates, staging and treatment. The also article references a study done in Baltimore which reports racism and poverty forms of structural violence and the effects on excess mortality among African Americans without insurance- ultimately showing  they were more likely to to be susceptible. The authors also used other historical data and research to support heir claims. Efforts through Partners in Health were made to prevent the spread and transmission of diseases in Haiti. The efforts made in Haiti and Rwanda were cited, both the positives and negatives. The article also discusses ways to incorporate more interventions to help eliminate any social influences of disease. 

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Sara_Nesheiwat
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This article focuses on gender based violence and its ties with medical humanitarianism. The effects humanitarianism has on other violent acts versus ones effecting gender based acts such as rape and assault. A main point made in this article is the fact that special humanitarian attention to gender based violence in fact has a negative effect on the overall addressing of the issue in its entirety. The reason behind this being cited is the fact that it depoliticizes the issue when unprecedented attention is given to gender based violent acts. The article then notes that by paying attention to why this is failing, we can think of new ways of addressing this issues and violence, making it more equal.

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Sara_Nesheiwat
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A main concern is the fact that no disaster will ever be the same. A hurricane in one area will be very different in another area, despite the same source of destruction. This is because each areas has a different population, different needs  and different services available in each area. The most challenging part is the ability to foresee what might be good resources or equipment or forms of medical care and best to supply at each different disaster since each one is unique.