Avianto has identified an important paradox that occurs when disaster studies and policy rhetoric link the concept of vulnerability to categories of persons based on their natal population/"race," age, socioeconomic or immigrant or indigenous or disability status, gender, and more. It is this slippage I find troubling in some of the examples given in this thread, despite knowing the rhetorical aims (and their implementations) are to shift existing paradigms and foci by planners and policy makers.
As the anthropologist Laura Nader pointed out ruefully to our discipline in the 1970s -- “Don’t study the poor and powerless, because everything you say about them will be used against them” (Nader in Dell Hymes’ Reinventing Anthropology, 1972).
The paradoxical flip side is, as we all know and have advocated: the very people identified as "embodying vulnerability" are the most expert at identifying the nuts and bolts barriers they face everyday to full participatory citizenship. They are very creative and strategic with their resources, and their everyday negotiations of social and built barriers point to often low cost pre-planning that ought to be front-loaded instead of after-the-fact mop ups after deaths and destruction.
It is easy to make these links for others outside our fields from key examples: curb cuts from sidewalks to roadways built for access of people using wheelchairs and now indispensable to local businesses loading and unloading, folks pushing strollers or bicycles, rolling suitcases... The link between the invention of the first (& most ergonomic) typewriter keyboard in Denmark by a teacher of the deaf (mid-1800s) to promote the literacy of deaf students who could not hear spoken language; TTYs (text messaging); videophones (Skype, etc); voice recognition (OK, we don't love verbal cueing our way through a phone queue, but Dragon anyone?); first transcribing pens, and on and on. All catalyzed by disablement experiences to now benefit and give communication ramps to everyone with access to them.
In previous writing on the topic of reconstituting vulnerability by locating it in persons rather than systems and processes, one of my foci involves the levee failures that deluged mostly African American unevacuated residents of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina actually gave the city a pass-by. Who died: elderly disabled Black people. Justifications for delay of humanitarian for militarized responses rely on rhetorically mobilizing the disability concept. Black people in New Orleans were less able to "plan ahead," were "unable to act in a timely way," were unable to "act in a civilized manner, so looted while others died." All cognitive and developmental impairments, to shift focus from the Congressional environmental racism that de-funded levee construction and maintenance; the political racism that brought National Guard empty-handed except for weapons and appropriated for themselves the few relief supplies and transport that got through the barriers of water. We find recent resonances in apologists for Saudi Arabia's lack of trained personnel and preplanning that place blame on African Hajjis who bore the greatest losses by attributing whole-scale cognitive impairments to them.
Now I am engaged as a participant observer in a further US federally-supported project where environmental racism arises in targeting whom shall forfeit clean air, water, and land in the "sacrificial zone" (gas industry term) for the super-sized fractured gas compressor station (4 X greater than other compressor stations - instead of 400,000 cubit feet a day of fracked gas propelled by engines, 1.4 billion cubit feet a day) proposed by Dominion Power acting as a limited liability company that applied to FERC (US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) to build the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP). Because the gas industry has been entirely successful in their advertising campaign that "gas is clean energy," such sacrifices are required of private citizens to secure domestic energy solutions. I don't need to elaborate that fractured gas shale reserves are from 96% lower in CA to a little more elsewhere than industry estimates; that the gas propelled by this super compressor station requires routine emissions of methane, Co2 and No2 at geometrically higher than already unsafe levels of smaller versions, is now intended for foreign sales at higher than domestic prices.
The site for the 1 compressor station to cover the state of Virginia is a historically Black community, rural, majority elderly because of out-migration from no local jobs, disproportionately chronically ill, in Buckingham County. This geographically large, very rural county, is one of the poorest in the nation, with 25% living below the poverty line, 45% African American, many of whom are descended from people enslaved by white families in this county. They do not want activists against the ACP to talk about this as environmental racism. In their eloquently crafted statements, Union Hill community members use public health and environmental data to express concerns for anyone living in proximity to this project. This community has learned not to play "the race card," the "victim card" as individuals among them receive a few of the teaching or social work jobs available in a county whose revenues mostly come from resource extraction (clear-cutting forests, kyanite mine, slate quarry) and a prison.
As both ethnographer and social justice activist, I navigate that razor's edge of how to discursively connect the dots for Virginia's Democratic state politicians, the governor and 2 senators who support the ACP, about their own legacies and this unacknowledged example of environmental racism and the wishes of this most impacted community.
This is the discursive issue Ben raised and all of us ponder in our ongoing process of connecting the dots for those who make policies, who fund programs, who design and implement preparedness strategies and post-disaster responses. How do we use our data, bringing the science and social science together in grounded, meta-analytical concepts, without our work and words being "used against" the very people whose perspectives we try to foreground in public and governmental fora?
Thank you for raising this rhetorical yet materially consequential issue in this thread,
Lakshmi
Lakshmi Fjord, PhD
Scholar-in-residence, Dept. of Anthropology
University of Virginia
