User:Phoebetree269/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Sacrifice zone

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I think the narrative within environmental justice matters and I found that in this article, the idea of a sacrifice zone seemed to narrow in on a death-centric/harm-centric narration. I would like to evaluate this article and consider ways to framing these zones without only engaging in harm-centered narratives while still highlighting the harm these zones enact on neighboring communities.

Evaluate the article
I first went to examine some of the sources to evaluate whether the term "sacrifice zone" is still being used or if this article was slightly out of date. While most of the articles were written in the early 2010s, the term has been used by the Global North since the 1990s and the Global South since the 2010s. The sources evaluated a range of dates that went up all the way to 2022. While the list of references is not a complete list of the ways in which the literature around "sacrifice zone" has developed so far, just from this article alone, the spatial pattern of how the term has been used reminds me of various other instances in which White-dominant, Western institutions have exported Euro-centric narratives.

The article gives examples from both the US and Chile but only describes these occurrences within the context of the country. It doesn't reference the larger international systems that have made it so that these "sacrifice zones" exist as artifacts of institutional racism and violence. I think the article could have been aided by a more robust discourse on environmental racism and, again, narratives that lean away from violence-centered language.