Emma Garnett

Developing a feeling for error: Practices of monitoring and modelling air pollution data:

This paper is based on ethnographic research of data practices in a public health project called Weather Health and Air Pollution. (All names are pseudonyms.) I examine two different kinds of practices that make air pollution data, focusing on how they relate to particular modes of sensing and articulating air pollution. I begin by describing the interstitial spaces involved in making measurements of air pollution at monitoring sites and in the running of a computer simulation. Specifically, I attend to a shared dimension of these practices, the checking of a numerical reading for error. Checking a measurement for error is routine practice and a fundamental component of making data, yet these are also moments of interpretation, where the form and meaning of numbers are ambiguous. Through two case studies of modelling and monitoring data practices, I show that making a ‘good’ (error free) measurement requires developing a feeling for the instrument–air pollution interaction in terms of the intended functionality of the measurements made. These affective dimensions of practice are useful analytically, making explicit the interaction of standardised ways of knowing and embodied skill in stabilising data. I suggest that environmental data practices can be studied through researchers’ materialisation of error, which complicate normative accounts of Big Data and highlight the non-linear and entangled relations that are at work in the making of stable, accurate data.

Enacting toxicity: epidemiology and the study of air pollution for public health

Abstract This paper presents air pollution as a ‘post-human’ public health phenomenon. It draws on an ethnography of a multidisciplinary research project called Weather Health and Air Pollution to explore the material ways in which air pollution challenged scientists’ conceptualisations of harm and health. The epidemiologists on WHAP used statistical techniques to correlate data of air pollution concentrations with mortality and morbidity data collected by hospitals in order to establish a quantified measure of the health effects of exposure to air pollution. Initially, these correlations were problematic: plotted data points failed to map over temporal patterns. A series of negotiations followed. As a result of these, the concept of ‘season’ emerged as a temporal figure through which the very existence and meaning of air pollution was put to the test. Indeed, attempts by researchers to hold stable the notion of toxicity signalled the problem of trying to assess the bodily response to a polluted environment that has supposedly ‘already been’. The paper concludes by arguing how contemplating health through the lens of the material dimensions of time allows public health to: first, view health problems as constituted through bodies and environments, rather than as a relation separating the two; and second, open up indeterminacies and uncertainties as a generative condition of air pollution, and perhaps public health more generally.

Automobility reconfigured? Ironic seductions and mundane freedoms in 16–21 year olds’ accounts of car driving and ownership

Abstract In the light of the ‘peak-car’ thesis, this paper explores the driving-related desires and practices of adults aged 16–21 and their parents from the UK. Tropes of freedom and independence were commonly evoked; but were pragmatically framed by concerns of finance, utility and risk. Car ownership was prized only for instrumental reasons, and as one tool in a mixed, collective transport network: it had been decoupled from automobility. Environmental sustainability was notably absent from discussions. It may be too early to herald the end of automobility but, for these participants, its seductions have been rendered ironic, rather than aspirational.

Air Pollution in the Making: Multiplicity and Difference in Interdisciplinary Data Practices

This article traces an emergent tension in an interdisciplinary public health project called Weather Health and Air Pollution (WHAP). The tension centered on two different kinds of data of air pollution: monitored and modeled data. Starting out with monitoring and modeling practices, the different ways in which they enacted air pollution are detailed. This multiplicity was problematic for the WHAP scientists, who were intent on working across disciplines, an initiative driven primarily by the epidemiologists who imbued the project with meaning and value as the protagonists of “health.” To work collaboratively implies a stable, singular, and shared research object, however: one kind of data, one version of air pollution. In detailing two attempts by researchers to address the inadequacies of modeled and monitored data, this article explores the ways in which difference and multiplicity were negotiated and transformed. In doing so, this article suggests that it is the mobility and instability of data that are particularly fruitful for exploring the facilitation and enactment of new realities, while also making explicit the emergent problematics and partialities which inevitably result.

Knowledge Infrastructures of Air Pollution: Tracing the In-Between Spaces of Interdisciplinary Science in Action

This chapter draws on ethnographic research of interdisciplinary air pollution science. Interdisciplinarity characterises contemporary public health research and ethnographers are increasingly contributors to these epistemic milieus. There has been limited research to date on the role ethnographic knowledge can play in the production of science and its objects of concern. Discussing the different fieldsites that made up this ethnography, the chapter details the role of scientific data in the construction of shared spaces of concern and collaborative research relations. Modifications to different air pollution data mobilised informal knowledge infrastructures that sustained and produced interdisciplinary ways of doing and knowing. By foregrounding the less visible work of repair and maintenance, the socio-material relations of science could be studied and engaged with in explorative and experimental ways. To conclude, the author proposes how ethnographers may be able to potentially contribute to future framings of health.

Introduction: Entangling Ethnography and Health

Health can be understood as a concept, a practice and a capacity, and is inherently complex, fluid and indeterminate. Ethnography, with its attention to how relations unfold between people, places, practices and things, is well suited to explore the situated meanings of health. The introductory chapter describes the scope and purpose of this collection, which draws together contemporary ethnographies investigating health, through a variety of topics, settings and disciplines. We describe the multiple ways in which ethnography and health become ‘entangled’ with one another through the research process, and how ethnographic and health knowledge emerge, take form, shape and challenge one another. We discuss emerging directions in ethnography and health, and raise important questions about how these entanglements produce new ways of doing both.

Materialising links between air pollution and health: How societal impact was achieved in an interdisciplinary project

Societal impact is an increasingly important imperative of academic funding. However, there is little research to date documenting how impact is accomplished in practice. Drawing on insights from Actor–Network Theory, we explore the research–policy interface within an interdisciplinary research project on the relationships between air pollution and human health. Health policy impact was important to the researchers for moral as well as pragmatic reasons but it was a goal that was seen as potentially in tension with that of doing science. In fields such as air pollution and health, networks of policymakers and researchers are inevitably entangled, and we found that processes of engagement operated to delineate science from policy. Health was initially black-boxed and under-explicated, used as a signifier in itself for societal impact. By mobilising networks of policy actors, brought together in workshops to rank the importance of policy scenarios for the research team, the connections between air pollution and health were materialised and made actionable. This was achieved by framing existing data sets, emission technologies, policy expertise, pollutant species and human health in particular ways and, in doing so, excluding others. The process of linking air pollution and health research to achieve societal impact not only influenced how these phenomena were known but, critically, enabled and constrained potential policy responses. Tracing these research arrangements made the material discursive processes of ‘impact’ visible and analysable as objects of social science scholarship, and therefore generated a productive site for critically engaging with processes of environment and health science and policy.