This dual set of images encourages the view to consider how one maps gentrification projects. I am thinking of work by Lindsey Dillon on Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard and the "Breathers of Bayview Point" (see Dillon 2015, 2017, 2018) on gentrification and the toxicity of blowing apart "ruined" buildings to renovate them into something new. Dillon's work examines both the social toxicity as well as the radiactive particles that become airborne.
This is a particularly timely visualization, giving the ongoing and increasingly dangerous scale of California wildfires. As a native Californian, I grew up knowing that fires are a part of our natural ecology, however the scale and destruction of wildfires has notably increased in the past decade.
I wonder if a similar visualization exists for earlier fires, and if so, if there is a way to collage calendars of different fires across the last 20, 30, 50 years? How could such a visualization show the mounting urgency of climate change?
This image shows a bird's eye view of toxicity. However, I wonder how we can better incorporate the human element into these scales. Could we collage it with data on hospital visits, pharmacy records for asthma medications, emergency room visits for difficulty breathing?
Aesthetically, the rhythm and repetition of the image is effective and strong. It shows change and the passage of time, and does provide a feeling of accumulation, or heightening circumstances, with hazardous symbols. The everydayness of the calendar feels real and close-up, and the worsening affect feels critical. It does automatically conjuer ideas about land, however with the green to red spectrum and wildfires parallel to the air quality measured herein. Maybe simple lettering as part of the calendar to label as air?
This image demonstrates how the logics and ethics of the police state enable such vital public infrastructures as Santa Ana's needle exchange program to be eradicated under the false pretenses of protecting "public welfare." It also shows a high level of ignorance or disregard, among Santa Ana's city officials, for the well-established findings and recommendations made by medical anthropologists and other social scientists that study HIV transmission.
In my opionion, this image communicates the nuance required to effectively understand and address toxicity as a social issue. It also unveils the discursive risks embedded in the "common sense," where overly simplified solutions contribute to, rather than attenuate or resolve the complexity of medical epidemics. It's unsettling to imagine the provision of a box of sharp objects, intended to inject toxic substances into bodies of people struggling with addiction, as a safety measure. And yet, careful studies have shown that these actions can save lives.
This image is ethnographic in that it represents a contemporary controversy over how to understand and address the transmission of HIV through the use of intravenous drugs. But, at the same time, as an unsuspecting viewer, all we see is a box of sterile needles. That is, without context, the viewer could come to wildly different conclusions about the argument behind this picture. This is not intended as a critique of the image but rather an opportunity.
Sterile Ethics ->Toxic Politics
The image is uncomfortable. It immediately strikes me as a danger. Even though, upon further inspection, I can see the orange plastic covers on the tips of the needles, indicating a barrier and a level of safety, I have been socialized to think of needles, not only as a source of discomfort (receiving a shot), but also as a potentially life-threatening danger.
