Jody A. Roberts

Why The Toxic Substances Control Act Needs An Overhaul, And How To Strengthen Oversight Of Chemicals In The Interim

The Toxic Substances Control Act gives the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the authority to regulate industrial chemicals not covered by other statutes. Today there are more than 83,000 such chemicals. However, the law is widely perceived as weak and outdated, and various stakeholders have called for its reform, citing the EPAs inability to regulate the use of asbestos, among other substances. We analyze the flaws in the act and suggest ways in which the EPA might better position itself to manage chemical risks and protect the publics health. In addition to the new tools and technologies it is adopting, the agency needs new allies-both inside and outside the government-in its efforts to identify and control hazardous chemicals.

Reflections of an Unrepentant Plastiphobe: Plasticity and the STS Life

My adventures with plastic have provided a personalized tour of many of the tools and concepts that STS scholars use to unpack the lives of others. This essay explores my efforts to figure out how to use those tools and concepts on my own life. Examining those efforts has required me to assess the tension between my academic investigations into the toxicity of the plastic materials of everyday life and the ways my own lifes possibilities—and in particular the life of my daughter—are inextricably linked to those materials. Drawing on recent work in STS, particularly that of Donna Haraway, I suggest that these experiences are a form of ‘becoming with’ the world. In a larger sense, I argue that they offer an opportunity for a more politically engaged scholarship and hope in knowing that STS interventions can matter. This essay situates my work within current STS scholarship that examines concepts of risk, facts, and uncertainty. Ultimately, it aims to use the plasticity of my STS life as a way to demonstrate how our scholarly focus on the politics of risk might be incorporated into advocacy for a politics of concern.

Realities of environmental toxicity and their ramifications for community engagement

Research on community responses to environmental toxicity has richly described the struggles of citizens to identify unrecognized toxins, collect their own environmental health facts, and use them to lobby authorities for recognition and remediation. Much of this literature is based on an empiricist premise: it is concerned with exploring differences in how laypeople and experts perceive what is presumed to be a singular toxic reality that preexists these varying perspectives. Here, we seek to reexamine this topic by shifting the focus from facts to facticity-that is, by exploring the many types of knowledge that communities develop about toxicity and how these knowledges articulate with the ideas of scientific and governmental authorities about what kinds of information are valid bases for policymaking. In making this shift, we are influenced by work in semiotic anthropology and science and technology studies (STS), which emphasizes that lived experience generates distinct realities rather than different perceptions of the same underlying state. Using this framework, we present an analysis of oral history interviews conducted in 2013-14 in the small American town of Ambler, Pennsylvania. Part of Amblers legacy as a nineteenth- and twentieth-century center of asbestos manufacture is that it is home to two massive asbestos-containing waste sites, one of which was being remediated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at the time of this study. Our interviews demonstrate that even asbestos, a toxin with a well-established public narrative, is a fundamentally different object for different members of the Ambler community. For many of these individuals, the epistemology and practices of the EPA are incongruent with or tangential to their toxicity-related experiences and their consequent concerns for the future. As such, our findings suggest caution in framing the community engagement efforts of environmental health agencies primarily as facilitations of citizen science; this approach does not acknowledge the multiplicity of toxic realities.