Gwen Ottinger

Buckets of Resistance: Standards and the Effectiveness of Citizen Science

In light of arguments that citizen science has the potential to make environmental knowledge and policy more robust and democratic, this article inquires into the factors that shape the ability of citizen science to actually influence scientists and decision makers. Using the case of community-based air toxics monitoring with ‘‘buckets,’’ it argues that citizen science’s effectiveness is significantly influenced by standards and standardized practices. It demonstrates that, on one hand, standards serve a boundary-bridging function that affords bucket monitoring data a crucial measure of legitimacy among experts. On the other hand, standards simultaneously serve a boundary-policing function, allowing experts to dismiss bucket data as irrelevant to the central project of air quality assessment. The article thus calls attention to standard setting as an important site of intervention for citizen science-based efforts to democratize science and policy.

Undone Science: Charting Social Movement and Civil Society Challenges to Research Agenda Setting

‘‘Undone science’’ refers to areas of research that are left unfunded, incomplete, or generally ignored but that social movements or civil society organizations often identify as worthy of more research. This study mobilizes four recent studies to further elaborate the concept of undone science as it relates to the political construction of research agendas. Using these cases, we develop the argument that undone science is part of a broader politics of knowledge, wherein multiple and competing groups struggle over the construction and implementation of alternative research agendas. Overall, the study demonstrates the analytic potential of the concept of undone science to deepen understanding of the systematic nonproduction of knowledge in the institutional matrix of state, industry, and social movements that is characteristic of recent calls for a ‘‘new political sociology of science.’’

Changing Knowledge, Local Knowledge, and Knowledge Gaps STS Insights into Procedural Justice

Procedural justice, or the ability of people affected by decisions to participate in making them, is widely recognized as an important aspect of environmental justice (EJ). Procedural justice, moreover, requires that affected people have a substantial understanding of the hazards that a particular decision would impose. While EJ scholars and activists point out a number of obstacles to ensuring substantial understanding—including industry’s nondisclosure of relevant information and technocratic problem framings—this article shows how key insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) about the nature of knowledge pose even more fundamental challenges for procedural justice. In particular, the knowledge necessary to inform participation in decision making is likely not to exist at the time of decision making, undermining the potential for people to give their informed consent to being exposed to an environmental hazard. In addition, much of the local knowledge important to understanding the consequences of hazards will develop only after decisions have been made, and technoscientific knowledge of environmental effects will inevitably change over the period during which people will be affected by a hazard. The changing landscape of knowledge calls into question the idea that consent or participation during one decision-making process can by itself constitute procedural justice. An STS-informed understanding of the nature of knowledge, this article argues, implies that procedural justice should include proactive knowledge production to fill in knowledge gaps, and ongoing opportunities for communities to consent to the presence of hazards as local knowledge emerges and scientific knowledge changes.

The Winds of Change: Environmental Justice in Energy Transitions

Environmental injustices have long been recognized as an important social dimension of energy systems. Like other kinds of polluting facilities, power plants, refineries, uranium mines, and sites of fossil fuel extraction, to name a few, are more likely to be located near the most vulnerable populations, usually communities of color or low-income communities. These facilities are frequently sited and built without the consent or even participation of the communities and individuals most affected by the facilities. And the extent to which emissions from energy facilities harm human health and the environment is a subject of on-going contestation, in which citizens struggle, often unsuccessfully, to have their insights into local impacts recognized by decision-makers. Transitions to renewable and low-carbon sources of energy promise to render obsolete many of the facilities that environmental justice activists frequently target, including oil refineries and coal-fired power plants. Yet replacing the most noxious energy facilities with greener sources of power will not, by itself, obviate the injustices that characterize our energy systems—namely, the inequitable distribution of environmental hazards, and the inability of communities to affect decisions with profound consequences for their environment and health. In fact, as they are currently being designed, the energy systems that appear most likely to succeed fossil fuel-based ones share key characteristics with their predecessors that raise similar environmental justice concerns—and present the possibility that we will reproduce old patterns of injustice even as we transition to new energy technologies. Science as Culture, 2013 Vol. 22, No. 2, 222–229, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2013.786996

Exposing infrastructure: how activists and experts connect ambient air monitoring and environmental health

Ambient air monitoring is one way that community groups, environmental justice (EJ) activists, and environmental agencies assess the health effects of exposures to toxic chemicals. However, monitoring does not measure human exposure directly, leading to the question, how are air quality measurements connected to claims about exposure and health? Since activists and regulatory experts often clash over assessments of environmental health effects, how might the approaches taken by the two differ? Comparing reports on ambient air monitoring from social movement groups and government experts, we show that both make connections between monitoring data and health using a well-developed infrastructure for health assessment. EJ activists rely on the infrastructure to a greater extent than previously acknowledged, although they do challenge fundamental categories, especially distinctions between short- and long-term exposures. Experts working within the infrastructure exercise considerable discretion in how they interpret and implement the standards and categories of health assessment, including by transgressing the short- and long-term distinction in some cases. Our findings call attention to similarities in lay and expert ways of knowing that enable the sharing of information infrastructures and show that information infrastructures are not determinative but potentially malleable, even in the context of expert practices.

Is it good science? Activism, values, and communicating politically relevant science

The validity of citizen science conducted by community activists is often questioned because of the overt values that activists bring to their investigations. But value judgments are a necessary part of even the best academic science, and scientists whose findings suggest the need for policy action can learn from the example of citizen scientists. Communicating clearly about value judgments in science would give the public a better basis for distinguishing between responsible and irresponsible research on controversial issues. Abstract