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SoiferI VtP Annotation: Fukushima

The visualization and caption indicate how toxicity is often about choices that people make, and that toxicity can be layered and multidimensional (social, physical, geographical, environmental, etc.). The visualization gives off a sense of the multiple forms of labor taking place in the site, and the precarity of a space that is so vulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis. Yet the toxicity of leaving the place is even more unbearable to the people who identify themselves with the blue spaces, and so they select to stay despite the dangers involved.

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SoiferI VtP Annotation: Fukushima

It would help to have more explanation of the significance of this place as a toxic site and how that toxicity pervades it. In addition, it would be helpful to provide a bit more context about your research team and why they are there, as well as why your team was interested in gender and what this says about the place and toxicity. It may also help to shorten the caption to the main points you wish to convey regarding how this image fits within your project on toxicity of place.

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SoiferI VtP Annotation: Fukushima

The photo appears to be made by the ethnographer(s). The contrast between the sufers and the construction workers and their vehicles is extremely interesting and unexpected--one would not necessarily expect to see both in one site. In addition, showing the path the surfers take as opposed to the water itself is an interesting move. There appears to be a sort of tension in the image, even as the surfers appear to signify the calmness of a recreational activity, there is a sense of them being out of place. 

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SoiferI VtP Annotation: Fukushima

It may be helpful to zoom in a little bit more and/or to have an explanation of the site, so as to enhance understanding of what is significant about this particular location that is being visualized in the place the ethnographers are looking at. What are the construction workers doing? Where are the surfers going? Where is toxicity located in this place/image? Presently it is unclear and could use a bit more direct interpretation/explanation by the ethnographers. 

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SoiferI VtP Annotation: Fukushima

I am not entirely certain at this point, but it would appear that toxicity is complex when it comes to place and identity as impacted by environmental and social precarity. In addition, the manner in which toxicity is sometimes inescapable: even if one leaves a site that is toxic, one risks coming across other forms of toxicity in another place. Thus exposure to various forms of toxicities can at times be informed by choice. Or even if a site is toxic, one may not want to leave due to its significance in one's lifestyle. 

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Elena Sobrino

Photo and caption draw out two dimensions of the place, the shoreline, as both a place of recreation and site of a massive construction project, both of which the men you study find themselves part of. It's great that both the men with surfboards and the construction equipment are both captured in a single frame.

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Elena Sobrino

I'm so curious about the connection between masculinity and polluted places. The particular tension you foreground in this image--the stakes of pursuing recreation in contaminated waters--is also something that emerges in my own field work in Michigan. The Great Lakes and rivers in my fieldsite are tremendously valued for the sport and leisure they enable (like fishing, swimming, or kayaking), although admittedly I haven't tracked as carefully the gendered dynamics of this valuation as your project does.

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