I feel that I may have answered this question in my first annotation. The image and its caption undermine the epistemological framework that we employ to understand toxicity, warfare, violence, and ecological destruction. How and why do we know what we think we know? What events have seemed insignificant, only to become catastrphically important in the future?
The image speaks of the increased gentrification of El Vado that comes at a faster pace than the infrastructural skeleton to support it. The increased vehicular traffic that navigates narrow roads have impacted levels of toxicity in the neigbhourhood. While the economically stronger have avenues to vacate the city, the artisinal communities are trapped in between the diode of toxicity and gentrification. The image asks to think about the logic of toxicity and its pervasiveness that accompanies urbanization in the present.
It would be helpful if the ethnographer could tell us more about the artisinal communities. Perhaps there is something to say about the toxicity of gentrification that problematizes social relations, especially for communities with deep affiliations with place.
The image and caption together help us think about how pollution, gentrification, and urban development converge to generate emerging conditions of environmental injustice in Cuenca.
One element of the caption that I did not understand is the section that explains that expansion into the sector with alcohol addiction and insecurity probelms caused many neighbors who could afford it to leave. Who infringed on who? Or did the social problems migrate to an area that previously was unaffected when development pushed them to new regions of the city?
It is a montage of images, showing different types of Cuenca, including trafficked areas, and what seems to be a historic section. I don't know where the images came from, I assume they are taken by the author. While the images are nice enough, I don't know how to interpret them and they feel disconnected from the caption itself. Or perhaps I am not given the information I need to link the caption to these images.
Perhaps focusing on one image that really illustrates the caption or furthers its argument.
While I like how the visualization draws our attention to how gentrification furthers environmental injustice, I would like they images to further that argument in a more evident way, or for them to be explained through the text.
Pictures and caption work very well in noting that Cuenca is facing fuel-related toxicity, however, I missed their ethnographic insight. The ethnographer's argument is a claim for intervention, yet, an ethnographic narrative of the experience of toxicity could be further developed. One remains wondering about how people perceive this noise and air pollution that the ethnographer mentions.
The source of the images is not clear.
