A Wary Alliance: From Enumerating the Environment to Inviting Apprehension

Abstract

In this paper we resituate discussions of community-based science beyond the emancipatory rhetoric of democratization, creative commons, and the blurring of the bulwarks of expertise to include consideration of the potentially constrictive instrumentalist scientific idiom produced by and through these practices. Collectively, we apply four interrelated insights already available within STS literature to the chemical ecologies that we are immersed within and perpetuate: 1) projects engaged in the use of science for justice claims cannot fully escape reproducing hierarchies of knowledge-power, type, and knower; 2) the pursuit of science in these instances has the potential to foreclose imaginative horizons of "how" and "why" in favor of "how much";3) the pursuit of more data sets the stage for adversarial epistemological encounters that can lead to entrenchment rather than resolution; and 4) these practices have the resultant effect of defining and confining (democratic) participation to one in which data become an essential gateway to having a voice. Following from this, we ask: what are the approaches to apprehending the environment that might not so easily boil down to binaries of benevolence or harm, or to renderings of uncertainty confined to the specifications of statistical confidence intervals, that in turn justify further scientific inquiry? We gesture towards an expansive conversation that we call Nicholas Shapiro, Email: nshapiro@chemheritage.org Shapiro et al.Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 3 (2017) "inviting apprehension." Such approaches beckon multiple strata of apprehending the environment to provoke public inquiry and intervention into the questions that undergird what we assume are the problems of today and the avenues through which we must engage them.

Chemo-Ethnography: An Introduction

“…Rather than simply celebrating the liberatory potential of intoxicating drugs or starting from privileged access to an altered sensorium, our own toxic methodology is grounded in nearly a decade of research on how standard methods of detoxifying the atmosphere also sustain infrastructures of toxic exposure (Shapiro, Zakariya, and Roberts ). Our approach to chemo‐ethnography also comes from personal experiences of caring for loved ones with cancer, whose bodies and subjectivities have been remade by the haunting specters of radioactive elements and then shocked with poisonous cures (see Kirksey ).…”

“…Some cultural anthropologists are eschewing the instruments that shape knowledge in the realm of Big Science, working instead to build their own, more accessible inscription devices that produce knowledge with arduino circuit boards, nine‐volt batteries, color LEDs, and $7 gas sensors available from Amazon. As chemo‐ethnographers expand the conventional anthropological toolkit, many are joining other bricoleurs , tinkerers, and thinkers in not only describing the world as it is but also in imagining alter‐worlds as they might be (Shapiro, Zakariya, and Roberts ; cf. Ingold ).…”

Care in Trouble: Ecologies of Support from Below and Beyond

“…Examples of this can be seen in anthropological work attempting to relate with violent and messy toxicants: Not only in projects searching to care for and support practices of environmental data justice currently endangered by denialist policy‐making and anti‐evidence movements—such as the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (Dillon et al. )—but also in other initiatives where design enables alternative strategies of commitment and intimate entanglement beyond present‐day “citizen science.” For instance, Shapiro and colleagues’ () adapted artivist toolkits for the embodied, collective, and qualitative appreciation of aerial transformations—how particles and aerial bodies move about, forging toxic bodily connections—but also worked with artists and co‐developed installations and performances to “invite apprehension” of air pollution.…”

“…The aim here is not to provide “counter or alternative facts to established questions, but to reimagine what the appropriate questions (and therefore facts) might be” (Shapiro et al. , 587). This is done by opening up chemical components and air as matters of wider public scrutiny and discussion, in all their troubled complexity.…”

Practicing environmental data justice: From DataRescue to Data Together

“…They have challenged exclusions from environmental knowledge production, asking who gets to collect authoritative environmental data, and through what process. They have also produced alternative forms of environmental data, since most information about pollution in the US is industry self‐reported or reliant on inadequate or incomplete collection methods (Agyeman et al., ; Altman et al., ; Brown, ; Corburn, ; Ottinger, ; Saxton, ; Shapiro et al., ). As one example, in the 1990s, organisers from a neighbourhood on the border of a Shell chemical facility in Louisiana developed a low‐cost method of air quality monitoring, called “air buckets.” They did so because they discovered that the state – which had declared Shell Chemical's air quality emissions “safe”– was relying on inadequate data on the air they breathed (Allen, ; Lerner, ; Ottinger, ).…”