Yes, though it may be best to think of it as scaffolding rather than creating a public. There are a few. The project should scaffold and animate
-- the intergenerational group of researchers working on the project (mostly co-located at UCI)
-- a network of environmental justice educators and researchers (linked through the Beyond Environmental Injustice Research and Teaching Collective)
-- MPNA-GREEN, the community-based, place-focused environmental organization that we partner with in the project
-- a network of environmental justice organizations, working against the isolation experienced by many that are local-based and place-focused.
From the begining, the Formosa archive has been designed to support the transnational network of activists and researchers involved (see quote below).
Activists like Diane Wilson have been in touch with and traveling to Taiwan on multiple occasions (see 2010 Black Planet Award ceremony). The project began through a conversation about Wilson's data collection. Fieldwork in Taiwan led to the involvement of activist fishermen, researchers, journalists, and lawyers, which broadened my understanding of the community.
Eventually, I learned about the lively exchanges between campaigns against Formosa in Louisiana and Vietnam, partly enabled through increased use of Zoom and other video conferencing tools during the pandemic lockdown.
To deny state and local authorities the exclusive right to speak for them in the global and local marketplace, these representatives of civil society [anti-Formosa activists] have tapped into domestic opportunity structures, pro-actively and persistently deploying their limited organisational, legal and discursive resources. Upon their failure to stop investment agreements, [activists] have campaigned to prevent the projects’ completion or to enforce Formosa's adherence to environmental and labour regulations. Activists in Texas, Louisiana, Taiwan and beyond have gradually formed an exchange network, sharing information and learning from each other's successes and failures. While losing key battlegrounds in Texas, they have successfully forced Formosa to abort its expansion plans in Louisiana in the 1990s and currently seek to derail the ‘Sunshine Project’. They have also damaged the electoral prospects of selected subnational politicians associated with or supportive of Formosa. Under their pressure, Louisiana's state government has scaled back the state's generous tax exemption scheme.
In their conflict over Formosa Plastics, subnational state and non-state actors have purposefully built relationships with foreign counterparts. The former have connected with Taiwanese authorities, defining Taiwan as an economic opportunity and ‘beacon of freedom’, thus infusing their international action with normative and geopolitical dimensions. The latter have reached out to Taiwanese environmental activists, further validating the construction of Taiwan as a free and open society. Sub-state agents’ keen awareness of opportunities and threats foreign actors pose to their contests over paradiplomacy and foreign governments’ recognition of US states as international actors unequivocally bring subnational diplomacy into the realm of ‘high politics’. (Tubilewicz 2021)
The purpose of the archive is to produce “archivists.” Whether or not they participate in “my” archive, I intend to enable and provoke an archiving practice, which is an end in itself because archiving changes the way you orient to your surroundings. Becoming an archivist changes what you can “see” and what you can “say.” What can/should be recorded? What can/should be made publicly available? These are not innocent questions. “We don’t even know what the body (of an archive) can do!”
Yes, because this archive is always also an educational endeavor with young people and their teachers, it aspires to provoke publics who care about EiJ historically, presently and imaginatively for future generations.