Erasure, Demolition, and Violent Obsolescence in the Urban Margins

2021 ◽  
pp. 82-104
Author(s):  
Peter C. Little
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Health ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Flood Control ◽  
Forced Displacement ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Migrant Laborers ◽  
Toxic Exposures ◽  
Slow Violence

This chapter explores the lived experiences and politics of erasure, demolition, and obsolescence logics in Agbogbloshie. The author highlights how the migrant laborers who make up the majority of workers in Agbogbloshie have faced repeated rounds of eviction and forced displacement. The author shows how e-workers struggle to negotiate state-based forms of violent erasure fueled by demolition and flood control logics that paradoxically redirect and reorient the focus and politics of environmental health in Agbogbloshie. The experience of displacement and eviction in Agbogbloshie exposes intersecting logics of erasure, demolition, and obsolescence. The chapter explores how e-waste workers experience “slow violence” in the form of toxic exposures, bodily distress, and displacement. But Agbogbloshie is not simply a precarious space of destruction or an impossible place to live. As this chapter shows, e-waste workers sustain cultural life amidst dire lived experiences of erasure in Ghana’s urban margins.

NGOs and the Rescue Narrative

2019 ◽  
pp. 84-100
Author(s):  
Erin M. Kamler
Keyword(s):  
Policy Change ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Trafficking Victim ◽  
The Public ◽  
Migrant Laborers ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
Female Migrant

In this chapter, I interrogate the experiences of those whose work responded to the supposed trafficking “victim”—the employees of abolitionist anti-trafficking NGOs in Thailand whose organizations provided shelter to former sex workers and advocate for policy change. Through an analysis of interviews, I show how NGO employees narrated the issue of trafficking to members of the public as well as to themselves, and how this “rescue narrative” gave voice—or failed to give voice—to the lived experiences of the female migrant laborers who their organizations were trying to help. I explore five dominant narratives that highlighted the challenges employees faced navigating the intercultural dimensions of their work, and the struggles they experienced trying to implement policies related to rescue. I suggest that these narratives reveal deeper personal struggles encountered by the employees, and consider how such struggles may risk hindering the effectiveness of their work.

“Toxic Culture”: The Spectrum and Origins of Resigned Activism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Lora-Wainwright
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Health ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Business Owners ◽  
Value Of Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
Economic Marginality ◽  
Slow Violence ◽  
Toxic Culture

Chapter 3 begins to flesh out the contours of resigned activism through the case of Baocun village, a major site for phosphorous mining and fertiliser production. It shows how industrialisation deeply diversified the local population, ranging from poor migrants to wealthy business owners and bore unequal effects on them: while some are better positioned to take advantage of opportunities, others suffer a precarious existence affected by socio-economic marginality and the slow violence of environmental health harm. It focuses most closely on unfolding processes of resignation among the migrant population—who stand to suffer the most from pollution—and poor locals. The chapter illustrates how financial dependence on polluting activities is a form of “disaffective labour” (cf. Hardt 1999) which pushes migrant workers and poor locals to take pollution and their precarious position for granted. They regard toxicity as a part of the natural environment and environmental afflictions on the body as “normal”. In this context, the value of life and parameters to define it are slowly but firmly altered.

Conclusion Dramatization as Research

2019 ◽  
pp. 236-246
Author(s):  
Erin M. Kamler
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Development ◽  
Human Trafficking ◽  
International Research ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Migrant Laborers ◽  
Female Migrant

The book concludes with a summary of the project’s intervention, which sought to articulate the lived experiences of marginalized female migrant laborers—supposed “victims” of human trafficking in Thailand—through the feminist, liberatory modality of musical theater. I offer a discussion of how human rights advocates can further work to break through spaces of bystanding and engage with their beneficiaries as equals; how women at the grassroots, who seldom have a voice in the foreign-driven projects intended for their benefit can engage more productively with Western “experts;” and how can these “experts,” in turn, might adopt new ways of implementing interventions and understanding themselves. I discuss the power and utility of merging the arts with feminist international research, and I suggest ways for the Dramatization as Research (DAR) praxis to serve as a tool for future international development advocacy work.

Public Policy Analysis to Redress Urban Environmental Health Inequities

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 245-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Chircop
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Policy Analysis ◽  
Environmental Health ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Health Inequities ◽  
Daily Work ◽  
Privileged Position ◽  
Analytical Skills ◽  
Community Health Nurses ◽  
Public Policy Analysis

Public policies may not have been designed to disadvantage certain populations, but the effects of some policies create unintended health inequities. The nature of community health nurses’ daily work provides a privileged position to witness the lived experiences and effects of policy-produced social and health inequities. This privileged position requires policy competence including analytical skills to connect lived experiences to public policy. The purpose of this article is to present an example of an urban ethnography that explicates inequity-producing effects of public policy and is intended to inform necessary policy changes. This study sheds light on how issues of childcare, housing, nutrition, and urban infrastructure in the context of poverty are fundamental to the larger issues of environmental health. This policy analysis documents how the Day Care Act of Nova Scotia, Canada explicates patriarchal and neoliberal gender and class assumptions that have implications for mothers’ health decisions.

Migration or Forced Displacement?: The Complex Choices of Climate Change and Disaster Migrants in Shishmaref, Alaska and Nanumea, Tuvalu

2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 341-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Marino ◽  
Heather Lazrus
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Change Adaptation ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Critical Infrastructure ◽  
Mitigation Strategies ◽  
Disaster Mitigation ◽  
Forced Displacement ◽  
Social Pressures ◽  
Increasing Risk ◽  
Climate Refugees

This article compares migration options in Shishmaref, Alaska and Nanumea, Tuvalu as responses to increasing risk of disaster. In both communities, increasing hazards and risks are associated with climate change—making the communities some of the first to be identified as environmental migrants or “climate refugees.” In both cases, what residents, researchers, and other stakeholders fear is that a large disaster will take lives and destroy critical infrastructure, causing communities to be displaced. However, we argue that migration pressures as a result of habitual disasters and increasing hazards interact with other migration pressures on the ground. In the lived experiences of residents, forced displacements and voluntary migrations are not so easily separated but are complex decisions made by individuals, families, and communities in response to discourses of risk, deteriorating infrastructure, and other economic and social pressures. Ultimately, residents make choices under constrained inventories of possibility and climate change adaptation and disaster mitigation strategies must consider these complex lived experiences in order to be successful.

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