Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders / Edition 2

by Kim Fortun

Overview

The 1984 explosion of the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India was undisputedly one of the world's worst industrial disasters. Some have argued that the resulting litigation provided an "innovative model" for dealing with the global distribution of technological risk; others consider the disaster a turning point in environmental legislation; still others argue that Bhopal is what globalization looks like on the ground.

Kim Fortun explores these claims by focusing on the dynamics and paradoxes of advocacy in competing power domains. She moves from hospitals in India to meetings with lawyers, corporate executives, and environmental justice activists in the United States to show how the disaster and its effects remain with us. Spiraling outward from the victims' stories, the innovative narrative sheds light on the way advocacy works within a complex global system, calling into question conventional notions of responsibility and ethical conduct. Revealing the hopes and frustrations of advocacy, this moving work also counters the tendency to think of Bhopal as an isolated incident that "can't happen here."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226257198
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	07/24/2001
Edition description:	1
Pages:	488
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Kim Fortun is an associate professor in the Science and Technology Studies Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Table of Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE: THE TIMES
INTRODUCTIONAdvocacy, Ethnography, and Complex
Systems
ONEPlaintive Response
TWOHappening Here
THREE Union Carbide, Having a Hand in Things
FOURWorking Perspectives
FIVEStates of India
SIXSituational Particularities
SEVENOpposing India
EIGHTWomen's Movements
NINEAnarchism and Its Discontents
TENCommunities Concerned about
Corporations
ELEVENGreen Consulting
EPILOGUE
APPENDIX
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Editorial Reviews

Fortun (science and technology studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) brings the perspective of an anthropologist and an environmentalist to this study of the Union Carbide chemical plant explosion in Bhopal, India. She describes Bhopal's place in the global political economy, and casts the disaster there as a turning point in the politics of advocacy. She draws connections between ethnography and advocacy, and portrays the perspectives of workers, feminists, anarchists, and communities concerned about corporations. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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