This collection of differently themed oral histories -- in the South Asian American Digital Archive that Gina pointed us to -- gives good ideas for how oral histories could be collected and presented in communities where we are working on environmental injustice -- community members and research interns could propose themes then lead collaborative development of a thematic collection.
We've used artifact bundles
-- to collect material related to events where we do participant observation. See, for example, the artifact bundle associated with the Santa Ana City Council Meeting (4-19-2022).
-- to collect material relevant to organizational profiles that we are building for the project. See, for example, the artifact bundle associated with an organizational profile of FERC (US Federal Energy ? Commission).
This draft essay (for an edited vol focused on devices supporting experimental ethnography) says a little more about how we are archiving participant observation of events for our Santa Ana research: "Participation observation of public events: Meetings of the Santa Ana City Council have also been important in environmental governance, especially over the last two years as the city updated its General Plan. Cities in California are required to have General Plans; since 2016, all cities with CAL-EPA designated disadvantaged communities must include plans to address environmental injustice in their General Plan Updates – thus making such updates important venues for environmental advocacy. EcoGovLab researchers( including those who are MPNA community members) attended these and related meetings, collecting documents along the way, writing advocacy letters, and participating in formal public comment periods during recorded City Council meetings, later posted on the City’s website. Here, collaborative hermeneutics first involved the creation of artifact bundles for each meeting – with relevant clips excerpted, notes from lead-up meetings, advocacy documents, and so on. Researchers then annotated these bundles, using an often-used analytic structure titled “Reading an Event.” Some questions in this set are fairly straightforward, some less so: Who hosted the event and what was the stated purpose? What social groups are involved or implicated? What vocabulary was in play and how was it charged? Responses to these questions by different researchers sometimes confirm each other, strengthening a particular interpretation; other responses are markedly different or go in different directions. Sometimes the differences are worthy of argument and need to be worked out; often, the differences add hermeneutic dimensionality.
From my narrative bio: "A recurrent focus of my research has been on ways knowledge infrastructure subtends both environmental vulnerability and capacity to recognize and address such vulnerability. I have thus become increasingly invested in understanding and helping build knowledge infrastructure (including innovative educational programs at all levels, supporting technical infrastructure, public data resources, analytic and visualization capabilities, and the organizational forms needed to support and connect these). Knowledge infrastructures powerfully shape how societies anticipate, characterize, and deal with collective problems. Given the tangles of problems contemporary societies face -- and need to work on together -- building deeply interdisciplinary knowledge capacity with global scope is a high priority. This will be far from straightforward, depending on inventive project designs linking researchers across disciplines, generations, and geographies; linking research to education at all levels; and building new connections between universities, schools, governments, international organizations, businesses and other social actors. These have become key aims of my work, interlacing my research, teaching and organizational interests."
Supporting the above, for many years, I was involved in the work of the Research Data Alliance, through the Digital Practices in History and Ethnography Interest Group.
-- The archive is designed to support teaching -- in university and K-12 classroom, and in the community (though workshops, etc), drawing students in as researchers and archive content creators.
-- The archive should also support, preserve and share the toxic tours run by MPNA-GREEN. We need to build exhibits/installations like this virtual toxic tour of Louisiana’s Cancer Alley. Note this this stop/page of the tour, where we are experimenting with a layout that would allow a stop to be visited on differently themed tours (here, one on historical legacies – the sugar plantation tour – and another focused on combo disaster). We don’t yet have a layout that works well/intuitively.
-- The archive should support and preserve documentation of events like our on-going Reaching for Just Transition seminar series (designed to provide fa orum for discussing visions and plans for just transition away from fossil fuels, etc).
We have begun to think about a few user groups that need to be connected:
-- involved researchers. This is harder than it would seem: researchers in a small group can add content to the archive and others in the group not know about it. It would help if researchers, on a weekly or bi-monthly basis, listed their newest work in a text artificat added to the project page. The text artifact, in turn could, become part of a project timeline.
--a community-based environmental org in Santa Ana that we partner with. MPNA-GREEN's use of the archive will really depend on architecture that makes it easy to conceptualize and see where things are. This conceptualization and discovery could be supported with a weekly or bi-monthly emailto the group pointing to new or featured content.
-- teachers and students in Santa Ana. A weekly or bi-monthly email or bulletin could also support this.
-- educators and activists beyond Santa Ana drawn in because this case of enviornmental injustice is good to think with. This could be done with a monthly bulletin that goes out to EiJ GLobal Record collaborators, to the Beyond EiJ Teaching Collective and to the a broad list of environmental justice organizations (that have opted in).
This archive is hosted by the disasterSTS-PECE, which is run by the PECE Design Group on servers at University of California Irvine.
For about a decade, I'll been very involved in the development of the Platform for Experimental, Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), open source software supporting virtual research environments. PECE is now freely available as a Drupal distro on GitHub. PECE is especially designed for qualitative researchers but has potential for application across fields, providing a way to preserve and curate the qualitative commentary that is part of all collaborative research workflows. The PECE Design Group now runs multiple instances of PECE (DisasterSTS Network, STS Infrastructures and for the Center for Ethnography, among others), using side-by-side development to orient further technical development.
I have done extensive field research in India and the United States, and have active collaborations in East Asia (Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Cambodia) -- mostly focused on people and places dealing with significant environmental vulnerability and harms. I've worked ethnographically with many environmental activists and health scientists who do very impressive data work -- that has inspired by investment in digital research infrastructure and archive ethnography.
Yes, though it may be best to think of it as scaffolding rather than creating a public. There are a few. The project should scaffold and animate
-- the intergenerational group of researchers working on the project (mostly co-located at UCI)
-- a network of environmental justice educators and researchers (linked through the Beyond Environmental Injustice Research and Teaching Collective)
-- MPNA-GREEN, the community-based, place-focused environmental organization that we partner with in the project
-- a network of environmental justice organizations, working against the isolation experienced by many that are local-based and place-focused.
There are many and no-doubt ever developing discursive risks in this archive project--
-- As in all projects focused on vulnerable communities, especially those designed to draw out sources and cascading effects of harm, there is a risk of overshadowing community strengths and potentials.
-- Given escalating public and government attention to environmental injustice, there is a growing risk of rhetorical and conceptual lock-in -- that this project and archive needs to creatively and proactively work against.