She worked as a conveyor belt operator in the underground part of the steel mill's crushing and sorting plant (drobilʹno-sortirovochnaia fabrika) where iron ore is transferred from one production department to another. In the last part of the introduction, I will present my argument and explain the structure of the following chapters. Many Karlag (one of the Gulag camps located in Karaganda province) prisoners worked on the construction of the steel factory.
For many of the latter, living in Temirtau was not really a matter of choice and decision. For people of lower social status, their future and the future of their children are more exposed to risk. Based on the analysis of media discourses on environmental problems and industrial risks in Temirtau starting from the 1980s to the end of the 1990s, which.
Its modern facilities and the latest technology used attracted people from all over the Soviet Union.
Methodology and sample
She is the daughter of Nazira, has an excellent foreign education and is a descendant of the old working intelligentsia. The Navy represents the lowest social segment of the young working class with poor education and low income. She was born in Temirtau and claimed to represent the opinion of the community and not the experts.
Nevertheless, her education, profession and experience show that she represents the ecologists of the city more than the lay population. Each issue of the newspaper consisted of four pages until 1997 (in the 2000s the newspaper grew to as many as 32 pages).
Trust
He defines trust/distrust as “the part of the deep grammar of any society” and as a factor that “determines our social behavior.” Some scholars argue that one of the hallmarks of the pre-Perestroika Soviet era was a lack of it. Michael Bernhard explains such a form of distrust as a legacy of the Stalin period, when the Soviet state was political.
In his book on the last Soviet generation and the end of Soviet rule, Jurchak (Iurchak) claims that in order to analyze past discourses, the researcher must study two types of documents (Iurchak. I will now present an analysis of articles selected from the subscription of the local Temirtau newspaper from 1980 to 1993. In the early 1980s, Temirtauskii rabochii usually published material on the environment at a frequency of twenty to thirty articles per year.
In the early 1980s, much of the overall discourse on the environment was taken in the context of the issue of planting trees or greening (ozelenenie). An article that appeared just after a conference of the Society for the Protection of Nature pointed to the management committee of the Society itself as responsible for many shortcomings in the work of environmental protection in Temirtau.24. The authors of the articles were inspectors of the Society for the Protection of Nature, heads of the City Soviet (City Council), fishing and hunting inspectors, freelancers (neshtatnye) and newspaper correspondents, local residents, heads of various departments of the factories KarMet (it was the name of the Temirtau steel mill in Soviet times), Karbid (the name of the carbide factory), and Karaganda Cement (the name of the cement factory), together.
In Temirtau, this process was not revealing new information about industrial pollution (such information had been discussed, albeit very discreetly, even in previous years), but information about the consequences of construction and. A reader of the paper would have gotten the clear idea that ecological issues were more complex than previously thought. I argue that the situation in Temirtau in the early 1990s cannot be characterized as a situation of mistrust between citizens and the state, because the majority of Temirtau residents have not left the city and continue to work in the steel factory (and swim in the lake, for example) today.
Lay knowledge as opposition to expert knowledge
Researchers have developed a wide range of approaches to the question of the relationship between lay and expert knowledge of health. One of the young people surveyed answered that "[she] doesn't say 'I'm healthy' at all (ia tak ne govoriu)". The issue of health is one of the main points of discussion in daily life at the factory.
The company and steel mill contract workers tend to identify health as the ability to work and sometimes relate health to workplace safety. Only one of the respondents, Lena (a city resident), was able to think about ecological risks in a more neutral way. For her, ecological risk was one of the most important factors (along with food) that determines whether someone will live a healthy life, or at least a life free from disease.
For Madina, who left Temirtau, ecological risk was embodied in the "yellow teeth of the Temirtau residents as a sign of health problems". This may be one of the reasons why some citizens relate ecological risks to the ecological situation in Temirtau, while some relate it only to disasters. In the case of Temirtau, the ambivalence of the term expert on ecological risk is more than clear.
Thus, tools, sensors, equipment and statistical numbers determine the ecological risk measurement specialist in Temirtau. This ambivalent position of ecologists is reflected in their attitude towards the inhabitants of the city. A certain part of the population perceives them as specialists or experts (based on the assumption that ecologists are specialists with knowledge, equipment and data).
Sources of lay knowledge
In Chapter 2, I presented an analysis of newspapers from the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period in order to discover and trace the ways in which ecological expertise and belief were being formed and operated, and I will now describe lay sources. knowledge today. As with most subjects, ecological knowledge is usually part of the general knowledge that children should receive at school. Textbooks for EkoShkoly represent the publisher's ideas about the relationship between agencies dealing with environmental problems in the local community.
According to the scenario (po legend), the factory is an important source of employment and income for local residents; However, the health of the local population is deteriorating because the factory has no money to install purification equipment. My informant Irina, an ecology teacher, refers to the telephone hotline, which the city ėkologi has introduced to “collect information”. Further evidence suggesting that rumor is one of the sources of knowledge comes from one of my respondents.
This video contains only one comment, which states that a car left on the factory premises near the coking plant cannot be cleaned at all (due to the acid in the air). One of the rules was to believe or trust that everything provided by the state was under control, controlled and not harmful. However, Internet sources (along with interviews) make it possible to observe the responses of the population and contribute to a better understanding of how information flows and is consumed by the residents of the area.
As discussed in chapter 2, I have examined all available issues of the local newspaper Temirtauskii rabochii in the regional library starting from 1980 to 2014. The authors of the articles during all these years are the same people (fifteen correspondents; five of they published numerous articles). However, it can be believed that many articles have been written to find an excuse for the steel mill to continue its work despite the pollution.
Perceptions of environmental risk
None of my respondents were unaware of the environmental problems in Temirtau, but they use different coping strategies and some of them show different levels of psychological distancing from ecological problems. These coping strategies of residents of Temirtau are the following (this is not only based on the views of my respondents, but also on the basis of my direct observation during my work as a research assistant and analyzing Internet resources such as social networks): displacement of responsibility, denial of risk, a heroic -patriotic stance, adaptation to risk/become immune, minimization of risk, domestication of risk, neglect of risk and canonization of risk. The analysis of my respondents' actions showed that, apart from preparing coping strategies, most of them neglect ecological risks.
Thus, I argue that Temirtau residents engage in psychological distancing, using a variety of strategies to deal with environmental risks, generally based on (a) the idea of being excluded from the decision-making process, (b) the unwillingness to discussing ecological problems, (c) weak confidence in ecological expertise, and (d) neglect of health hazards. As a result, risk communication failed and the city's ecological problems were not resolved. These different coping strategies are rooted in the diverse social and historical backgrounds of the respondents.
Public discourse on environmental issues changed in the late 1980s, leading to a rethinking of ecological knowledge and available ecological expertise among residents and experts. Over time, the residents of Temirtau changed their attitudes and perceptions about the way the state has handled environmental issues. By studying lay knowledge and lay perceptions of ecological risk in Temirtau, I have sought to contribute to theoretical debates on the opposition between expert and lay knowledge, adding to our understanding of what these types of knowledge are like.
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