Written by Tim Schütz.
Image credit: The Asthma Files: Kaohsiung.
Introduction
In 2023, I returned to Taiwan for further social science research focused on environmental activism in response to the pollution caused by Formosa Plastics, one of the biggest plastics companies in the world, headquartered in Taiwan. One thread of research upon my return extended an initiative that I’ve come to call “Archiving Formosa Plastics”, designed to study environmental justice and governance issues related to the company across diverse settings, supporting various research, advocacy, and teaching endeavours.
The project started after getting to know an anti-Formosa activist in Texas named Diane Wilson. Since the Texas Formosa Plant started operations in the late 1980s, Wilson has collected many kinds of documents about the plant, eventually needing a large barn to store them all. I had many questions about these documents: When and how did these various documents gain and lose political value? Who would take care of and steward these documents into the future?
These questions turned into an investigation of data ideologies and how they take shape in highly contested political spaces. Data ideologies shape the ways individuals and groups collect, evaluate, and interpret data, articulate data’s significance, and parlay data into political arguments and strategies. It has become increasingly important to document and understand data ideologies over the last few decades with the growing availability and affordability of digital records.
During my stay in Taiwan, I collaborated with researchers at National Chengchi University’s Center for Innovative Democracy. The research group, led by Professors Wen-Ling Tu and Hua-Mei Chiu, has done research focused on Kaohsiung’s industrial sites for many years, studying recent transformations and struggles for “just transition”. The group’s research has also developed an impressive public-facing research archive called The Asthma Files: Kaohsiung linking many different types of data into many different storylines.
The Kaohsiung Archive, in turn, links into the many storylines of an even more expansive project, the Environmental Injustice Global Record (hereafter EiJ Global Record), composed of many different archives, each focused on a different setting facing environmental harms. The EiJ Global Record compares environmental governance dynamics in different settings, including Kaohsiung, Central Vietnam, and Calhoun County, Texas, all of which have Formosa plants. It also includes archives focused on the City of Santa Ana, California, Navajo Nation, and North Carolina, considered by many the birthplace of the U.S. Environmental Justice movement.
Storylines in the Kaohsiung Asthma Files Archive
I’ve learned through many years of research that digital platforms and archives focused on environmental justice are designed for and accomplish many different things, demonstrating what I consider their “design logic”. The website ToxicDocs, for example, hosts several thousands of declassified vinyl and asbestos industry documents and is primarily designed for speed and fast search ability (with over 1,300 entries for Formosa Plastics). However, besides a small series of curated documents, the platform doesn’t tell a story. Interactive advocacy websites like ToxicTours.org or the recently launched Louisiana Mapping Portal narrate and visualize the experience of frontline communities organizing against the petrochemical expansion. The EJAtlas project, in turn, impressively maps environmental justice conflicts around the world, allowing users to upload documentation, long-form descriptions, timelines, and overviews of key stakeholder groups.
The Kaohsiung Asthma Files Archive complements these projects, albeit through differences in purpose and design. It is less meant to share vast swathes of material but tells many stories at once, reaching beyond a focus on conflict. Consider, for example, the photo essays created by research assistant and historian Tsai-Ing Lu, including a focus on the Formosa Brothers Park and Museum. Besides an overview of the exhibits, the essay adds several layers of analysis, discussing the emergence and management of the park, as well as labour and industrial politics in the city. Other essays in the Kaohsiung Asthma Files Archive provide different views of the city and Formosa’s operations, often with comparative perspective—with collections focused side by side on the Kaohsiung Refinery, the Ruhr Valley in Germany, and the City of Manchester in the United Kingdom. The stories told here focus on Kaohsiung’s industrial legacy but also draw into perspective post-industrial transition efforts from abroad that have been important reference points for local community organizing.
Other essays present the city and Formosa’s operation from the point of view of people who live there. An essay and set of questions about air monitoring at an elementary school in the Renwu District of Kaohsiung (located right outside a Formosa Plastics Plant), for example, documents the creative efforts of teachers and children to understand and minimize pollution exposure. The stories to be told here focus on innovative data advocacy and pedagogy: Students build low-cost air purifiers and design their own digital database for collecting air monitoring data. The Kaohsiung research team is interested in understanding how students generate, visualize, and parlay data into action, including the kinds of stories they develop to present the data back to their community.
Finally, the group has begun to leverage digital mapping to “activate” the archive. A first draft of an evolving GIS Story Map leads visitors through four late-industrial communities—Dashe, Houjin, Dalinpu, and Linyuan—building from material stored in The Asthma Files archive. The StoryMap serves as a public-facing portal, offering historic and interactive maps that chart industrial development. In dialogue with the Dashe Environmental Protection Alliance, the group has also used the maps to visualize more recent concerns, including the increase in truck traffic that contributes to air and noise pollution, as well as a high number of road accidents. The story here points to the research group’s efforts to read the data landscape, figuring out what data is available and where there are data gaps.
Kaohsiung in Global and Comparative Perspective
The participation of the Kaohsiung Asthma Files Archive in the broader EiJ Global Record Project supports other storylines and ongoing learning across sites and archives. The Calhoun County Archive (which also foregrounds Formosa operations), for example, documents the work of activist-archivist Diane Wilson, using funds generated from a large legal settlement with Formosa Plastics. In addition to environmental monitoring and clean-up of plastic pollution, Wilson’s goal is to figure out and support a just transition for local fishing communities. Most recently, a group of over 100 fisher people has used settlement funds to purchase cooperatively run docks and fishhouses. There are many lessons here that the Kaohsiung Asthma Files Archive can build from and extend. In Taiwan, too, there are efforts to use lawsuits to hold Formosa accountable for its environmental harms and work to envision and support a just transition for coastal communities.
A focus on rendering visible and governable cumulative harm is also at the centre of the Santa Ana Archive, a project led by the University of California’s EcoGovLab and GREEN-MPNA. Unlike Texas or Taiwan, the City of Santa Ana is not characterized by large refineries but rather several sources of pollution that are often innocuous, including a cluster of metal plating shops. In an effort to study divergence in federal and state datasets that document toxic releases and violations of pollution permits, the EcoGovLab launched the GroundTruth Santa Ana Project, training residents to document facilities in their neighbourhoods. The project has revealed divergence in data collected by state and federal agencies in databases like FIND or ECHO. Beyond just calling out these divergences, the findings have served as conversation starters with public officials to discuss how gaps can be addressed, but also how to move beyond a siloed focus on individual polluters. These efforts are worth comparing with the on-the-ground monitoring done at schools in Kaohsiung and the degree to which they can help characterize cumulative impacts.
What becomes clear is that in both Santa Ana and Kaohsiung, schools have become an effective way to tell the story of environmental injustice. Further, they are sites for organizing. At monthly stakeholder meetings held at Century High School in Santa Ana, the EcoGovLab and GREEN-MPNA have assembled state agencies and community members to discuss improvements to environmental governance in the city. The EiJ Global Record Project is, therefore, also a space to reflect on how social science research can be more effectively linked to advocacy efforts.
From this perspective, the design logic of the EiJ Global Record archive is classically anthropological, characterizing both patterns and variations in environmental injustice across settings. Guided by a shared analytic framework, it can be tuned to context, then returning what is learned in a particular context to the ever-growing set of kin analytics associated researchers can take up in their diverse sites. Relevant examples include a set of questions to study late industrial schools or to guide the characterization of datasets. In my research, I’ve developed questions that focus on Formosa Plastics’ operations across settings or support analysis of ethnographic interviews (both created and found) that can stimulate exchanges.
Conclusion
In both academic and activist collaborations, I’ve found many kindred spirits who have come to environmental justice and data work from different prior experiences and with different goals. Among them, there have been different ways of collecting, evaluating and interpreting data, different ways of articulating data’s significance, and different ways of parlaying data into political arguments and strategies. I’ve thus learned from them, and done my data work, led by their examples. I’ve also sharpened my understanding of what data ideologies and design logics are and how they undergird, shape and direct representations, sometimes tacitly, sometimes overtly.
The examples above show how the EiJ Global Record Archive is lively, promoting, and sustaining action beyond itself. Keeping our environmental archives–used and continually enriched–is a core goal in my own designs and in the designs of many data-focused environmental governance researchers and activists that I have encountered. If you are interested in joining the effort with a case study or community collaboration, get in touch.
Tim Schütz is a PhD candidate at the University of California Irvine’s Department of Anthropology and EcoGovLab. Schütz’s research and teaching focus on the role of data infrastructures in environmental politics and social movements. He is also an active member of the Design Team for the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE). tschuetz@uci.edu
This article was published as part of a special issue on “Exploring Technology and Society in Taiwan.”
Taiwan Insight 