No abstract

STS and social movement scholars have shown the importance of 'getting undone science done' to advance the goals of social movements fighting environmental health injustice. The production and mobilization of counter-expertise, meaning the reliance on expertise, broadly construed, to contest regulatory decisions based on scientific knowledge, must be further analyzed by differentiating among types of expertise and strategies to mobilize them. In social mobilization against the unrestricted use of pesticides in Argentina, the affected community in Ituzaingó Anexo developed three types of expertise. The community first drew upon its own local knowledge of cases of illness and, as lay people, produced the first epidemiological map of this area. Then, they enrolled scientists and NGOs as allies to jointly learn about pesticide contamination as an explanation for illness. The enlisted scientists produced new knowledge by conducting environmental and epidemiological studies. Finally, sympathetic public health authorities, legal experts, and a district attorney designed a successful legal strategy to stop fumigations in that area and enforce local regulations. The case confirms the importance of producing undone science, and shows that its effectiveness can be explained by intertwined strategies deployed by a triad of lay/local, scientific, and legal experts to overcome the expertise barrier.

This review presents the contributions of research on the intersection of science and social movements, its theoretical and methodological limitations, and potential solutions for its further development. Three different types of relationships between activism and knowledge have been identified within environmental health conf licts: (i) layactivists requesting help from sympathetic scientists in order to conduct independent studies; (ii) expertactivists promoting new research agendas and sub-fields within established scientific disciplines; and (iii) expertactivists acting beyond the limits of the academic community and partnering with social movements. In this review, I argue that much of the existing literature considers expertise as "something" possessed by individuals, and heavily emphasizes the difference between "lay" and "expert" activists. This entails two main theoretical reductionisms: (i) reification of knowledge; and (ii) overlooking the contribution of activism to expertise and vice versa. I propose considering expertise as the property of a network and focusing future research within environmental health conf licts on the co-emergence and construction of a network of expertise (Eyal 2013) or ethno-epistemic assemblage (Irwin & Michael 2003) and social movements. Through this symmetrical network approach, we will be able to develop a more consistent theory of the co-production of activism and expertise, as well as its political implication to fight environmental health injustice.