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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.
. As countless frontline communities around the world testify, pollution can also be embodied, viscous, acrid, and uncanny. It can stick in the back of your throat and cling to your nostrils. It can bring you out in rashes or leave you short of breath. For those living in DAVIES & MAH 9781526137029 PRINT.indd 120 08/06/2020 15:32 Introduction to Part II 121 highly toxic geographies, such as Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” pollution can also catch you off-guard and wake you up in the middle of the night (Davies 2018). Pollution can also be witnessed in the
., Dolezal, N., and Moross, J. 2016. Safecast: Successful citizen-science for radiation measurement and communication after Fukushima. Journal of Radiological Protection, 36(2), S82. Davies, T. 2019. Slow violence and toxic geographies: “Out of sight” to whom? Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 1–19. Gabrys, J. 2014. Programming environments: Environmentality and citizen sensing in the smart city. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(1), 30–48. Irwin, A. 1995. Citizen Science: A Study of People, Expertise, and Sustainable Development. London
” (Malin and Ryder 2018), not only because the experience of pollution rarely fits neatly into isolated silos of social injustice – along traditional lines of race, class, g ender – but also because of the changing material complexities of pollution itself, where multiple toxicants often overlap, interconnect, and intersect in unpredictable ways. Other aspects of environmental injustice, however, have remained tragically entrenched. More than three decades after the first wave of environmental justice research, the same toxic geographies in the Deep South that