Social movements and the scaling of memory and justice in Bhopal

Abstract

This paper examines the politics of scale in the commemorative work undertaken by the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB), a coalition of social movement organisations seeking justice for the victims of the Bhopal Gas Disaster of 1984. The argument traces how the ICJB attempted to contest the localisation of the disaster by the Indian state and the transnational corporations involved. I outline how the disaster, which had been scaled down from an extraordinary global event to a private non-issue, was re-scaled successfully across multiple scales of meaning and regulation through ICJB's mobilisation of the frame of 'second/ongoing poisoning'. This contestation over the scaling of the disaster crucially involved multiple processes of memory-work. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper reveals how the remembrance of the disaster functioned as a key site of the discursive and performative re-framings required to reinstate multi-scalar accountability for the disaster. Overall, the paper establishes the utility of the politics of scale approach in mapping the dynamics of the transnational mobilisations of memory by social movement organisations in pursuit of justice.

Collective memory of environmental change and connectedness with nature: Survey evidence from Aotearoa New Zealand

“…Second, research has revealed how environmental justice movements cultivate memories of environmental change in seeking to achieve their objectives. Such bottom-up memory work provides evidence of ‘what happened’ – thereby challenging amnesia and hegemonic narratives (Perreault, 2018) – and gives meaning to environmental pollution and suffering, which may help mobilise support for the movement (Bisht, 2018; Sayers, 2006). Third, a growing body of work investigates how local memories of environmental disasters – ranging from floods (Garde-Hansen et al, 2017) to bushfires (Reid et al, 2018) – facilitate disaster preparation and bolster community resilience.…”