Paper short abstract:

Canada's Chemical Valley surrounds the Aamjiwnaang First Nation. This paper examines the community's participation in a community health study and the representation of their health concerns. Informed by corporeal citizenship, the paper elaborates a sensing policy approach to environmental justice.

Paper long abstract:

When citizens enter deliberative spaces of engagement, they encounter discursive fields of knowledge. This paper examines the Aamjiwnaang First Nation's participation in a community health study and the representation of their environmental and reproductive health concerns. By participating in this study, Indigenous citizens of Aamjiwnaang encountered a paradox of engagement: while included in the health study deliberations, their small-scale, situated concerns became marginalized. Informed by corporeal citizenship, this paper elaborates a sensing policy orientation to public engagement for environmental justice. As an interpretive and intersectional lens, sensing policy focuses on practices of meaning-making and enhances scientific communication through the meaningful inclusion of citizen stories and lived-experiences. This multilayered lens aims to improve public engagement processes on matters of environmental and reproductive health by providing some insight into how public officials can interpret and incorporate lived-experience, situated bodies of knowledge and geopolitical context into decision-making. In response to the central question: "how can public deliberation processes create spaces that are conducive to meaningful engagement with Indigenous communities experiencing environmental injustice in their everyday lives", this paper draws upon findings from document analysis and media coverage as well as extensive field-work in Lambton County, including participant observation at townhall meetings, and participatory action research within Aamjiwnaang. Contributing to the distributive, procedural and discursive dimensions of environmental justice scholarship, this paper argues that a critical examination of Aamjiwnaang's inclusion in the health study reveals the need for creative and interpretive approaches to public engagement with affected communities while making space for citizen stories.