Fisk-Memo4


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What is the text about empirically?

Phenomenon: “environmentalism... as a political strategy for bringing together people, issues and ideologies that once seemed unrelated – without reducing diversity to benign pluralism.” (p. 3) “How has the Bhupal disaster been produced, suffered and remembered? What has been the shape and tone of advocacy in response to the disaster? How have the dynamics of late-twentieth-century world order affected what is possible and believable? How and for whom has environmentalism been a resource?” (p. 6) The practice of advocacy as a key empirical focus. (p. 9) “Written as disaster, Bhopal becomes a prism for drawing a shifting world order into visibility.” (p. 10) What are the “double binds produced by environmental crisis within globalization”? (p. 12)

Location: Situating Bhupal as a local site globally...

Scale: Micro-Macro – Bringing the “whole world together,” moving across places of articulation, observing collisions between discourses along the way.

Player Network: Ch 1 – State (US) Ch 2 – Workers/Residents (US) Ch 3 – Union Carbide Ch 4 – Workers (India) Ch 5 – State (India) Ch 6 – Victims Ch 7 – “Activists” Ch 8 – Women's Union Ch 9 – BGIA Ch 10 – CCC (Environment/Economy Bind)

Cultural & Social Structures in Play: Race, Gender, Class Globalization

Practices: Advocacy as “performance of ethics in anticipation of the future.” (p. 16) Enunciatory communities bounded by players embedded in (structural and temporal) double-binds.

Conceptual Environmental crisis/disaster produces double-binds which call groups (enunciatory communities) to speak. These groups utilize various technologies – organizational, rhetorical and textual – to position themselves in relation to the disaster and the rest of the world. Certain textual and organizational forms are found to constrain and enable certain types of crisis/disaster discourse, excluding and including different aspects of the crisis/disaster to benefit the author. Expertise plays a key role in the ways in which these technologies are mobilized across various groups – see refusal of community-nominated experts in emergency planning meetings and information sessions, “we're already 10 steps down the road”-style action on behalf of environmental activists.

Modes of Inquiry Marcus & Fischer (1986): Reconnecting ethnographic accounts to broader global system, bridging micro and macro levels of analysis. However, Marcus & Fischer fail to provide an explicit set of textual strategies for recontextualizing ethnographic accounts. Shifting stakeholder model to “enunciatory communities” model, where groups are “produced by double binds” in response to a “temporally specific paradox.” (p. 11) Draws on Bateson's work on double binds in family interaction (“I want you to disobey me”). Ethnographic methods, primarily participant observation and interviews were used. Additionally, discourse analysis is performed on a variety of media, including legal documents, advocacy statements, industry brochures and advertisements.

Structure & Performance The text explicitly describes 7 research questions in the introduction, each of which serve to specifically prompt an ethnographic writing project. Each chapter follows an enunciatory community which emerged from the double-binds resulting from the Bhupal disaster, and each chapter is broken down into 7 sections, answering each research question in turn. Chronological development is explicit, with (nearly) every chapter opening on a specific event between 1984-1986, following a specific community over time before starting again in the next. Informant perspectives vary between narratives describing particular events and transcripts of interviews and written documents.

Circulation Advocacy in Bhupal is written for a primarily academic (STS-leaning) audience, and seems to loosely follow the convention of other similarly targeted texts. Specifically, the introduction is largely devoted to broadly explaining the theoretical importance of the work, along with the modes of inquiry used.