Undone Science and Counter-Expertise: Fighting for Justice in an Argentine Community Contaminated by Pesticides

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.

Guest Editorial: Conceptualizing Justice and Counter-Expertise

“…The authors demonstrate that counter-experts explicitly negotiate identity politics as they traverse boundaries and challenge unjust scientific and technology systems. While establishing their authority as experts, these counter-experts must navigate dynamics of epistemic oppression from dominant groups (Dotson, 2014) in ways that are gendered (Arancibia and Motta, 2019;Kimura, 2019), class-based (Arancibia and Motta, 2019; Egert and Allen, 2019; Morrell, 2019), nationality-based (Egert and Allen, 2019), and racialized (Morrell, 2019). Pereira (2019) finds that scholars' positionality with respect to gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, age, and sexuality affects their ability to successfully set boundaries, and that structural barriers often result in 'the non-performativity' of their boundary-work (Pereira, 2019).…”

“…The three types of counter-expertise can be complementary and deployed simultaneously on behalf of a marginalized group, as in the case of the sprayed peoples (Arancibia and Motta, 2019). Each type of counter-expertise is deployed by a trusted actor on behalf of a marginalized group; sometimes the actor is from the marginalized group.…”

“…Each type of counter-expertise is deployed by a trusted actor on behalf of a marginalized group; sometimes the actor is from the marginalized group. Counter-experts wielding allied certified expertise might be credentialed professionals working inside their discipline (Arancibia and Motta, 2019), whereas counter-experts exercising transgressive expertise might be credentialed professionals working across disciplinary boundaries (Arancibia and Motta, 2019). These credentialed experts might be volunteers from the marginalized group or hired by the marginalized group.…”

“…Of the three types of counter-expertise, counter-experts with allied certified expertise or transgressive expertise are the most likely to be included in industry and government decision-making and processes of imagination because of their credentials, which imbue these actors with authority and status in scientised debates. Meanwhile, counter-experts who exert activated lay expertise might be volunteer citizen scientists (see Kimura, 2019), volunteer experiential experts (Morrell, 2019), or other types of local lay experts (Arancibia and Motta, 2019). These lay experts can be more easily suppressed and ignored outside of the local communities where they are authorized, that is, where they have established trust and wield authority over decisions related to science and technology.…”

The Sociology of Ignorance and Post‐Truth Politics

“…Growing interest in citizen science projects also indicates how communities can translate lay knowledge into research that in turn can help to bring in collaborations with scientists (Brown 2007;Kimura and Kinchy 2019;Kinchy 2017;Ottinger 2010). In addition to finding scientific experts such as toxicology researchers, communities also need to find experts in the law and in the government to ensure that the results are translated into remediation (Arancibia and Motta 2019). Increasingly, information technology and crowdsourcing are being used as resources to mobilize citizen science on a larger scale (Jalbert, Rubright, and Edelstein 2017;Ottinger 2017).…”