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11 Whose citizenship in “citizen science”? Tribal identity, civic dislocation, and environmental health research Elizabeth Hoover Introduction: Citizen science After decades of traditional health and environmental studies which left many communities – especially low-income and communities of color – feeling disempowered, community involvement in the production of science is being heralded as necessary for the achievement of environmental justice (Shepard 2002; Cohen and Ottinger 2011; Wylie et al. 2014). Citizen science (CS) is broadly defined as
This book examines the relationship between environmental justice and citizen science, focusing on enduring issues and new challenges in a post-truth age. Debates over science, facts, and values have always been pivotal within environmental justice struggles. For decades, environmental justice activists have campaigned against the misuses of science, while at the same time engaging in community-led citizen science. However, post-truth politics has threatened science itself. This book makes the case for the importance of science, knowledge, and data that are produced by and for ordinary people living with environmental risks and hazards. The international, interdisciplinary contributions range from grassroots environmental justice struggles in American hog country and contaminated indigenous communities, to local environmental controversies in Spain and China, to questions about “knowledge justice,” citizenship, participation, and data in citizen science surrounding toxicity. The book features inspiring studies of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research; different ways of sensing, witnessing, and interpreting environmental injustice; political strategies for seeking environmental justice; and ways of expanding the concepts and forms of engagement of citizen science around the world. While the book will be of critical interest to specialists in social and environmental sciences, it will also be accessible to graduate and postgraduate audiences. More broadly, the book will appeal to members of the public interested in social justice issues, as well as community members who are thinking about participating in citizen science and activism. Toxic Truths includes distinguished contributing authors in the field of environmental justice, alongside cutting-edge research from emerging scholars and community activists.
, ethnic minority and low-income communities continue to be disproportionately burdened by toxic pollution (Bullard and Wright 2009; Pellow 2018). Environmental injustice appears wherever social inequality and pollution collide. For decades, environmental justice activists have campaigned against the misuses of science, while at the same time engaging in community-led citizen science. Polluted communities have faced uphill environmental justice battles against powerful corporations and state regulators to prove their cases of toxic exposure (Bullard 1990; Taylor 2014
This chapter explores opportunities for publics to participate in the research process (as researchers rather than as the subjects of research or in the governance of research). The chapter examines the growing field of what is sometimes described as citizen science, but also called crowd-sourced research, amongst other terms. Because the terms citizen science and DIY science have become current, they are used here, but the approaches should not be seen as exclusive to the natural sciences (see, for example, Dufau et al. , 2011 and Dunn and Hedges
12 Modes of engagement: Reframing “sensing” and data generation in citizen science for empowering relationships João Porto de Albuquerque and André Albino de Almeida Introduction The dissemination of digital technologies has provoked a renewed interest in initiatives that seek to involve citizens and communities in the generation of data and in “citizen science.” The aim of these initiatives is often to widen participation by including citizens in processes hitherto not very accessible to them, such as the collaborative mapping of human settlements (de
right-wing political demagoguery, bent on “inflaming anger and resentment” (Hoffman 2018, 449) and willing to invent and disseminate new “facts” as needed for coercion and confusion in the name of proto-authoritarian political gamesmanship. This so-called populism is not the same as public participation in the creation of science, which involves “arrangements that facilitate the active involvement of DAVIES & MAH 9781526137029 PRINT.indd 59 08/06/2020 15:32 60 Environmental justice and participatory citizen science o utsiders” (Marres 2018b, 454) toward a
, may be won and lost by the crunch of code. If data is the new oil, when it comes to actual pollution, data also plays a vital role. The pollution data produced by multinational companies and environmental regulators is often at odds with the lived experience of frontline communities. In response, environmental justice activists have often attempted to record their own data about toxic hazards using a gamut of citizen science techniques. This is especially important considering that the burden of proof of DAVIES & MAH 9781526137029 PRINT.indd 237 08/06/2020 15
Drawing on scholarship in citizen science that has documented the enrollment of lay practices of knowledge production to denounce assemblages of capitalism, pollution, and inequality, this chapter turns to “toxic tours” in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Toxic tours began informally in the 2000s by a non-profit organization affiliated with the plaintiffs in the Aguinda v. Texaco lawsuit. In these tours, Donald Moncayo takes journalists, tourists, lawyers, and politicians to visit contaminated oil sites, using ordinary objects to assist visitors in seeing, smelling, and touching oil pollution for the first time: a glove, a long stick, a large recycled water bottle, a hand auger. These assorted tools work together to enable a direct engagement with the materiality of toxicity and legacies of extraction that would not otherwise be possible. In focusing on ordinary tools, this chapter brings the auger to bear on the public discernment of contamination and accountability, exploring how questions of industrial contamination are adjudicated, and what tools of knowledge production illuminate and what they occlude in the process. Toxic tours constitute a critical move beyond a notion of toxicity based on the triad of causality, individual bodies, and bounded environments, and toward conceptions based on porosity, relationality, and justice.
toxic contamination linked to a childhood leukemia cluster in Woburn, Massachusetts. Reverend Young and other citizen activists conducted their own community health study in Woburn in partnership with public health scientists. Woburn became a model for “popular epidemiology” in which “laypeople detect and act on environmental hazards and diseases,” often with conflicts between lay and professional ways of knowing (Brown 1992, 268). DAVIES & MAH 9781526137029 PRINT.indd 29 08/06/2020 15:32 30 Environmental justice and participatory citizen science From its
(Gieryn 1983; Jasanoff et al. 1995). DAVIES & MAH 9781526137029 PRINT.indd 35 08/06/2020 15:32 36 Environmental justice and participatory citizen science Despite the increasing relevance of civic science (often called citizen science) and research conducted outside of traditional scientific institutions for environmental health research, scientific arguments and more formalized investigations are obligatory in fields like science policy, chemical product development, or environmental activism. The process of scientization refers to how scientific authority is