Barbara L. Allen

Shifting boundary work: Issues and tensions in environmental health science in the case of Grand Bois, Louisiana

During the last three decades in the environmental movement there has been an important shift toward both the development and acceptance of heterogeneous science practices that encourage public participation on a number of levels (Allen, 2003; Fischer, 2000). This has been, in part, due to the emergence of environmental justice (EJ), a movement that combines issues of social justice with a broader conception of what counts as one’s environment (Gottlieb, 2001; Szasz, 1994). Eschewing the nature vs. culture dichotomy of traditional environmentalism, EJ incorporates the on-the-ground texture of daily life as well as struggles within the social order into a movement that challenges racism, foregrounds class issues, and highlights the inequities of a government-supported, big-business-asusual approach to regulation and policy. Yet, when scientists become involved in such movements as defenders of a ‘public interest’ or local community, as occurred in an EJ struggle in Louisiana’s cancer alley, they may adopt diverse strategies that do not always harmonize well.

Through a maze of studies: health questions and ‘undone science’ in a French industrial region

Near the city of Marseille is one of France’s largest industrial regions, home to over 400 industrial facilities. Adjacent to these facilities are towns whose residents have complained of myriad health problems, from respiratory illness and autoimmune disease to cancers. While human environmental health in this region has been studied repeatedly by state agencies and allied organizations, the studies focused on tightly constructed questions answerable within particular languages of expertise. This rarely translated into information that residents found relevant or credible in relationship to their own experience living in their polluted communities. We argue that these disciplinarily circumscribed health studies are conditioned by the way policy-relevant science is produced in France given the strong centralized state and its civil service elite. Thus many residents’ questions remain unanswered and the absence of answers produce a form of ignorance called ‘undone science’. We examine three studies paradigmatic of the kinds of health research that has been done in the region. We illustrate the disconnect between the profession-driven studies’ questions and outcomes, and the areas of greatest interest to residents. In concluding, we advocate for study designs which engage with local residents and attempt to fill the knowledge gap of their unanswered questions.

Justice as Measure of Nongovernmental Organization Success in Postdisaster Community Assistance

Through exploring multiple contemporary conceptions of justice, this article illustrates that justice matters when considering outcomes in nongovernmental organization (NGO) assistance. In environmental justice (EJ) scholarship, the term justice has been underproblematized, assuming a tacit understanding of the concept as fairness or equitable distribution of environmental harms. Using the rebuilding of two heavily damaged poor and minority neighborhoods in post–Katrina New Orleans as case studies, this article makes evident the different conceptualizations of justice embedded within the strategies and techniques of NGOs and community organizations. Examining both practices and outcomes, I argue that the definition of justice that NGOs implicitly or explicitly adopt in their strategies and technologies of assistance can lead to very different results in postdisaster neighborhood revitalization. For science and technology studies, conceptions of justice can help articulate a more critical social science that opens up the descriptive/normative divide. This is important in thinking about equitable social change and allied policy—as it applies not only to NGO assistance but also to other science and technology issues that intersect with marginalized communities as well.

Redesigning a Participatory Health Study for a French Industrial Context.

The Marseille, France, metropolitan area is home to a heavily concentrated industrial region directly adjacent to residential communities. These towns have been subjected to a wide variety of social science and public health studies, but residents continue to have many questions about health concerns for which they currently have primarily anecdotal evidence. Reflecting on our in-progress research in two of these towns, we argue that community-based participatory research that draws from both social science and public health science can be successfully adapted to the French political and cultural context and is key for developing environmental health research that is relevant for community residents and local leaders. Understanding and working within the customs of the local values and practices culture is critical for community-based participatory research regardless of location but is particularly paramount when working in non-United States contexts, since local values and practices will shape the particular techniques used within the community-based participatory research framework.

Knowledge Justice: An Opportunity for Counter-expertise in Security vs. Science Debates

ABSTRACT Knowledge justice provides a conceptual framework to apply principles of social justice in environments of competing interests regarding science. Both knowledge and its making can be seen as a good to be distributed, including all voices for whom the science will matter. In this framework, knowledge production is shared among a broader constituency of knowers representing both local and cosmopolitan voices. The problem of knowledge injustice can be seen in the U.S. government’s recent attempt to secure scientific knowledge about H5N1 or avian bird flu virus. The censorship produced a global debate between scientists and policy-makers over how to balance the nation-state’s desire for security with the life science’s tradition of open and shared research. This conundrum, known as the dual-use dilemma, obscures larger questions that lie outside of expert-centered domains—namely the concerns of many communities in the Global South struggling with the impact of the virus in their daily lives. An example of such counter-expertise is that of the backyard poultry farmer whose ways of knowing are foreign to science and policy experts who frame the ways in which knowledge about H5N1 should be developed, controlled, and used. While the H5N1 debate illuminated competing positions regarding knowledge production between powerful elites, it ignored the social justice inequities produced by the dual-use dilemma. The concept of knowledge justice provides a way of thinking about science that can include locally situated counter-expertise, disrupting the dual-use dilemma produced by competing dominant priorities of security and public health.

Architecture and organization: structure, text and context

This special issue seeks to take an imaginative look at notions of organizational structure and to draw on architectural perspectives in order to examine prevailing definitions of the notion of structure – in the architectural context, as something built – and to offer new ones. In short, this call for papers invites contributors to engage with various interpretations of the notion of structures. In recent years, a number of organizational scholars have given attention to ways of conceiving space in organizations. This has led to different ways of conceiving spatial arrangements, analysing social organization and understanding spatial relationships in terms of power, mobility and materiality. In terms of recent work on space, it is salutary to consider work by Bachelard (1994), Lefebvre (1991), Massey (1995), Kociatkiewicz and Kostera (1997) and Crang and Thrift (2000). However, there has also been a growing number of publications on architecture, design and design firms, from researchers such as Yanow (1995), Jevnaker (2005), Kornburger and Clegg (2004) and Dale and Burrell (2008). While this second body of research inevitably draws on concepts of space and spatial arrangements, it also gives attention to the relationship between architecture, structure and management and organizational arrangements. The initial intention for this special issue is twofold. First, it seeks to explore the relationship between design and structure; not in a deterministic way but rather with the purpose of challenging assumptions about the design of organizations – as both spaces and places of work – in order to expose the definitional character and rigidities of social architecture. Second, and given the interests of the guest editors, the intention is to take these issues specifically into the realm of architecture rather than space per se. This is because there is, as suggested above, a wealth of OS literature on space but less which gives attention to theorizing and speculating on architecture. Our concern is therefore more with the ‘built thing’ and the implications for spatial arrangements and relationships, although clearly these terms, space and architecture, have much in common.

Strongly Participatory Science and Knowledge Justice in an Environmentally Contested Region

This article draws insights from a case study examining unanswered health questions of residents in two polluted towns in an industrial region in southern France. A participatory health study, as conducted by the author, is presented as a way to address undone science by providing the residents with relevant data supporting their illness claims. Local residents were included in the health survey process, from the formulation of the questions to the final data analysis. Through this strongly participatory science (SPS) process, the townspeople offered many creative ideas in the final report for how the data could be used to assist in improving their health and environment and policy work is already in evidence, resulting from the study. Drawing from the literature on participatory science and expertise as well as from the initial outcomes of the local health study, I propose that SPS produces a form of knowledge justice. Understanding knowledge and its making as part of a social justice agenda aligns well with environmental justice frames. Through SPS, local residents have a hermeneutical resource to make sense of their embodied lives and augment their claims with strong data supporting actions for improving their health and environment.

Health issues in the industrial port zone of Marseille, France: the Fos EPSEAL community-based cross-sectional survey

AimCommunity-based participatory research (CBPR) is an increasingly common approach in the USA, but still relatively rare in Europe. In the industrial zone of Marseille, there is a long history of pollution, but little is known about the health implications. This study documented the prevalence of different health issues in two heavily polluted towns in the industrial zone using a CBPR approach.Subject and methodsThis study used a CBPR approach and epidemiologic methods to answer community members’ questions about the health of residents in Marseille’s industrial zone by randomly sampling a cross-section of residents to systematically document health issues in Fos-sur-Mer and Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhône, two towns in the industrial port area of Marseille, France.ResultsMany chronic illnesses were elevated in these communities, as compared to regional and national prevalences, including chronic skin problems, asthma, cancer, and diabetes. Chronic skin problems and asthma were among the most common chronic illnesses reported. A majority of respondents also reported acute symptoms that affected daily life, including eye irritation or nose and throat problems.ConclusionThere is likely an environmental explanation for why, even after direct standardization, the prevalences of many diseases were higher in these communities than elsewhere. The combination of CBPR and rigorous epidemiologic methods helps make our findings relevant to both community members and researchers.

Cities, Poverty, and the Environment

When I was asked by the theme editors, Kim Tanzer and Vincent Canizaro, to write a review essay of recent scholarship on the intersection of social justice and sustainability, it was impossible to ignore the topic of urbanization. While environmental degradation disproportionately effects the poor and less powerful of all cultures, it is certainly not only relegated to cities. In cities, however, we see the greatest density of people, many seemingly at the mercy of their environments. The urban realm is also a subject that we, as architects and design educators, spend much of our time thinking about, from problemsolving exercises to research questions. I begin with two world-inclusive works (a book and an exhibit) that examine the magnitude of the issues that link the city to social and environmental injustice. While the first book and exhibit introduce these global urban problems on a macroscale, the latter two books suggest a reframing of the problem toward enabling solutions and problem-solving strategies at the local level. Opening this no-holds-barred exposé of the living conditions of the worlds’ poor, Mike Davis