Alissa Cordner

Disavowing Politics: Civic Engagement in an Era of Political Skepticism1

Today, Americans are simultaneously skeptical of and engaged with political life. How does widespread cynicism affect the culture of civic participation? What are the implications for democracy? This study synthesizes data from a one-year collective ethnography of seven civic groups and theoretical work on boundary making, ambiguity, and role distancing. The authors find skepticism generates “disavowal of the political,” a cultural idiom that allows people to creatively constitute what they imagine to be appropriate forms of engagement. Disavowal generates taboos, and the authors show how disdain for conflict and special interests challenges activism around inequality. Political disavowal both facilitates and constrains civic engagement in an era of political skepticism.

Chemical Regulation on Fire: Rapid Policy Advances on Flame Retardants

Chemicals that are widely used in consumer products offer challenges to product manufacturers, risk managers, environmental regulators, environmental scientists, and the interested public. However, the factors that cause specific chemicals to rise to the level of regulatory, scientific, and social movement concern and scrutiny are not well documented, and scientists are frequently unclear about exactly how their research impacts policy. Through a case study of advocacy around flame retardant chemicals, this paper traces the pathways through which scientific evidence and concern is marshaled by both advocacy groups and media sources to affect policy change. We focus our analysis around a broad coalition of environmental and public health advocacy organizations and an investigative journalism series published in 2012 in the Chicago Tribune. We demonstrate that the Tribune series both brought the issue to a wider public audience and precipitated government action, including state policy revisions and federal Senate hearings. We also show how a broad and successful flame retardant coalition developed, leveraged a media event, and influenced policy at multiple institutional levels. The analysis draws on over 110 in-depth interviews, literature and Web site reviews, and observations at a flame retardant manufacturing company, government offices, and scientific and advocacy conferences.

Moments of Uncertainty: Ethical Considerations and Emerging Contaminants†

Science on emerging environmental health threats involves numerous ethical concerns related to scientific uncertainty about conducting, interpreting, communicating, and acting upon research findings, but the connections between ethical decision making and scientific uncertainty are under-studied in sociology. Under conditions of scientific uncertainty, researcher conduct is not fully prescribed by formal ethical codes of conduct, increasing the importance of ethical reflection by researchers, conflicts over research conduct, and reliance on informal ethical standards. This paper draws on in-depth interviews with scientists, regulators, activists, industry representatives, and fire safety experts to explore ethical considerations of moments of uncertainty using a case study of flame retardants, chemicals widely used in consumer products with potential negative health and environmental impacts. We focus on the uncertainty that arises in measuring peoples exposure to these chemicals through testing of their personal environments or bodies. We identify four sources of ethical concerns relevant to scientific uncertainty: 1) choosing research questions or methods, 2) interpreting scientific results, 3) communicating results to multiple publics, and 4) applying results for policy-making. This research offers lessons about professional conduct under conditions of uncertainty, ethical research practice, democratization of scientific knowledge, and sciences impact on policy.

Co-designing and Co-teaching Graduate Qualitative Methods An Innovative Ethnographic Workshop Model

This article describes an innovative collaboration between graduate students and a faculty member to co-design and co-teach a graduate-level workshop-style qualitative methods course. The goal of co-designing and co-teaching the course was to involve advanced graduate students in all aspects of designing a syllabus and leading class discussions in a required course for first-year graduate students. The authors describe the multiple stages involved in designing and teaching the qualitative methods course and discuss the challenges of this type of collaborative teaching. This type of collaboration builds on the existing strengths of workshop-style methods courses to improve student learning by providing opportunities for grounded engagement with epistemological topics and ample opportunities for feedback, discussion, and reflection on the research process. This collaborative teaching model, although difficult and time-intensive, provides measurable improvements to existing qualitative workshop courses by overcoming some of the limitations of workshop courses and providing significant benefits for graduate students in the class, the student co-teachers, and faculty.

A multisector alliance approach to environmental social movements: flame retardants and chemical reform in the United States

Research on environmental social movements often focuses on movements that target a limited spectrum of policy outcomes and that mobilize primarily around a relatively narrow swath of environmental issues. Through a case study of research and advocacy around flame retardant (FR) chemicals, we describe an unusual multisector alliance involving a broad coalition of participants and multiple levels of state and non-state targets aimed at influencing environmental governance of potentially toxic chemicals. This issue has brought together environmental and health activists, scientists, regulators, firefighters, fire safety professionals, journalists, hospital and building sustainability experts, and manufacturers and retailers. Our research draws on analysis of 126 in-depth interviews, literature and website reviews, and observations at an FR manufacturing company, government regulatory and research offices, and scientific and advocacy conferences. As part of the multisector alliance around FR regulations, many parties play a role in defining and acting on environmental health risks, with significant emphasis on public engagement in science and the impact of media. In these ways, the FR coalition partners have highlighted a new participatory form of environmental risk governance.

Strategic Science Translation and Environmental Controversies

In contested areas of environmental research and policy, all stakeholders are likely to claim that their position is scientifically grounded but disagree about the relevant scientific conclusions or the weight of the evidence. In this article, I draw on a year of participant observation and over 110 in-depth interviews, with the case study of controversial chemicals used as flame retardants in consumer products. I develop the concept of strategic science translation (SST), the process of interpreting and communicating scientific evidence to an intended audience in order to advance certain goals and interests. Engaging in selective, interpretive, or inaccurate SST allows competing stakeholders to bolster their arguments, strengthen their authority, and inspire change regarding a policy-relevant issue. Because stakeholders deploy imbalanced resources when they participate in contested environmental fields, their actions in those fields and the resulting policy outcomes often reduce not to the settling of scientific truths but to power differentials.

Firefighters and flame retardant activism.

In the past decade, exposure to flame retardant chemicals has become a pressing health concern and widely discussed topic of public safety for firefighters in the United States. Working through local, state, and national unions and independent health and advocacy organizations, firefighters have made important contributions to efforts to restrict the use of certain flame retardants. Firefighters are key members in advocacy coalitions dedicated to developing new environmental health regulations and reforming flammability standards to reflect the best available fire science. Their involvement has been motivated by substantiated health concerns and critiques of deceptive lobbying practices by the chemical industry. Drawing on observations and interviews with firefighters, fire safety experts, and other involved stakeholders, this article describes why firefighters are increasingly concerned about their exposure to flame retardant chemicals in consumer products, and analyzes their involvement in state and national environmental health coalitions.

Non-stick science: Sixty years of research and (in)action on fluorinated compounds

Understandings of environmental governance both assume and challenge the relationship between expert knowledge and corresponding action. We explore this interplay by examining the context of knowledge production pertaining to a contested class of chemicals. Per-and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFASs) are widely used industrial compounds containing chemical chains of carbon and fluorine that are persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic. Although industry and regulatory scientists have studied the exposure and toxicity concerns of these compounds for decades, and several contaminated communities have documented health concerns as a result of their high levels of exposure, PFAS use remains ubiquitous in a large range of consumer and industrial products. Despite this significant history of industry knowledge production documenting exposure and toxicity concerns, the regulatory approach to PFASs has been limited. This is largely due to a regulatory framework that privileges industry incentives for rapid market entry and trade secret protection over substantive public health protection, creating areas of unseen science, research that is conducted but never shared outside of institutional boundaries. In particular, the risks of PFASs have been both structurally hidden and unexamined by existing regulatory and industry practice. This reveals the uneven pathways that construct issues of social and scientific concern.

Defining and defending risk: conceptual risk formulas in environmental controversies

Environmental risks are contested topics, and definitions of risk often vary across contexts, disciplines, and institutions. Identifying and describing differences between risk definitions is particularly important because they directly impact risk assessment and management practices. This paper describes how stakeholders rhetorically define and technically operationalize the risks of industrial chemicals, focusing on contemporary debates over flame retardant chemicals that in recent years have been the subject of numerous risk assessments, regulatory activities, and activist campaigns. This paper uses a multi-method approach to develop six conceptual risk formulas which delineate the components that go into evaluating risk and the relationships between those components: the classic risk formula, the emerging toxicology risk formula, the exposure-proxy risk formula, the exposure-centric risk formula, the hazard-centric risk formula, and the either-or risk formula. Using chemical alternatives assessment as an example, this analysis demonstrates how conceptual risk definitions influence the operationalization of risk assessment and management activities.