‘We Are the Monitors Now’

Abstract

Residents of pollution hotspots often take on projects in ‘citizen science’, or popularepidemiology, in an effort to marshal the data that can prove their experience of the pollution to the relevant authorities. Sometimes these tactics, such as pollution logs or bucket brigades, take advantage of residents’ spatially ordered and finely honed experiential and sensory knowledge of the places they inhabit. But putting that knowledge into conversation with law requires them to mobilize a new, ‘foreign’ set of tools, primarily oriented to the observation, measurement and sampling of pollution according to conventional scientific standards. Here, I employ qualitative empirical methods in two case studies of communities ‘downwind’ of Canada’s contested tar sands region to demonstrate that the knowledge that is crucial to these citizen science strategies is not only local, situated and experiential in origin but also collectively generated and held. I draw on the notion of transcorporeality, emanating from feminist theory of the body, to demonstrate that the knowledge offered to law through these efforts often represents a fluid merger of experiential and conventional ways of knowing, posing a productive challenge to the strictly positive notions of science and evidence dominant in legal proceedings.

Participatory Research for Environmental Justice: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis

“…Project data were provided to the Crow Tribal Council at the request of the Tribal Chairman, to the Crow Tribal Environmental Protection Department and to the local wastewater authority, which subsequently was able to raise funds to install an automated water dispensing system, which allows rural residents to purchase municipal water at very low cost. (Mah 2017;Ottinger 2013;Scott 2016). With careful facilitation and authentic leadership, however, CABs may create a space where EJ community members practice collaborative governance with other stakeholders, including policy makers and industry representatives (González n.d.; Yuan et al 2020).…”

“…This finding suggests the importance of data communication and translation to prompt structural action. Participatory research values multiple knowledges, including indigenous and nonwestern forms of knowledge, which are often absent from modern decision-making spaces (Abma et al 2017;Corburn and Gottlieb 2005;Duntley-Matos et al 2017;Finn et al 2017;Houston 2013;Moezzi et al 2017;Ottinger 2017;Scott 2016). Translation of nonwestern forms of knowledge, or qualitative data, into forms perceived as more legitimate, like statistics, maps, and economic analyses, allows academics with the credentials of the research institution to present community knowledge so that it wields power (Jelks et al 2018;Krings et al 2018;Ottinger and Sarantschin 2017;Senier et al 2008).…”

“…Polluting industries typically possess greater power, in the form of funding and legal strategies, than the EJ communities they put at risk (e.g., Collins et al 2016;Gunz and Whittaker 2016). Often having formal complaints ignored (e.g., Carruthers 2008;Scott 2016), EJ community members may become discouraged in raising environmental health concerns, even when they are personally affected.…”

‘Wannabe Toxic-Free?’ From precautionary consumption to corporeal citizenship

“…Thus, 'we are forced to admit that there is both a predictability and a deep unpredictability to this' (Scott 2016, p. 279). The unpredictability stems from the profound uncertainties and complexities of the social and ecological entanglements of our times, and the 'predictability derives from the insights of the environmental justice movement: that pollution is most easily found in places inhabited by the poor, the racialized and the marginalized' (Scott 2016). Faced with the reality of weak state regulation, and the limitations of individualized strategies of precautionary consumption, we turn next to the development of an alternative framework for guiding political engagement on the question of everyday toxics.…”

The Demographics of Citizen Science Participation and Its Implications for Data Quality and Environmental Justice

“…Given the landscape of inequitable distribution of environmental degradation and the coupled disempowerment of those communities to defend their environment through more institutional channels, this positions citizen science as a powerful tool to allow these communities to gather knowledge that can aid in their ability to protect and/or access remediation resources for their environment ( Ramirez-Andreotta et al 2016;Wylie et al 2016). For example, projects like the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project and the Louisiana Bucket Brigade have harnessed the power of community data collectors to fight for better environmental protections in their communities (Scott 2016;Gonzalez et al 2011). Citizen science is uniquely suited to place the power of scientific inquiry into the hands of communities that need it most: those embattled by environmental injustice who may also have less access to environmental monitoring through other institutional means (Heaney et al 2011;Wylie et al 2017).…”