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- Convenor:
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Cynthia Browne
(Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
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Cynthia Browne
(Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
- Discussant:
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Cameron Brinitzer
(Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel explores not only how certain devices and regimes of scientific legibility have rendered environmental exposure a troubling and widespread feature of contemporary life but also how other kinds of experts collaborate to materialize exposure through practices of counter-knowledge formation.
Long Abstract:
Formaldehyde, PCBs, lead, but also noise, radiation, and viruses, are all entities that have been understood through science as actants capable of exposing unsheltered forms of life to harm. The detection of such entities, the identification of their pathways of damage, and the establishment of standards and protocols to help regulate their presence and safeguard the health of populations has, over the past century, become widespread. However, while a certain scientific logic of (environmental) exposure has now become commonplace, the methods and modes of knowing exposure has become increasingly democratized: grassroots activists and concerned citizens have developed their own devices for detecting and reporting exposure, from the networked efforts of Safecast and "radiation moms" (Kimura 2016) in the wake of Fukushima, to new indexical forms of detecting hydrogen sulphide on homesteads affected by fossil fuel extraction (Wylie et al 2017), to the use of "bucket monitoring" within and for communities neighboring petrochemical industries (Ottinger 2010). As such, knowledge made of and about exposure has become a contested agora of voices filled not only with scientists, but also other experts and community groups materializing exposure to counter its unequal distributions along lines of class, race, gender, and colonialism. Often, such actions operate both “with” and “against” scientific epistemologies; they find expression not only within scholarly journals and policy documents, but also through digitally-enabled platforms and databases, as well as through new kinds of image-making and forms of collaborative knowledge production.
Acknowledging diverse forms of expertise, this Combined Open Panel invites contributions that address how exposure is not only troubling but has also become troubled by this democratization of epistemologies surrounding environmental exposure. Submissions might take the appearance of traditional paper presentations but also dialogues and/or workshops that explore how this knowledge becomes public and perceived through different formats and modalities.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Jessica Madison Piskata (Oberlin College)
Short abstract:
This paper looks at the palimpsestic landscape of radioactive exposure in Jáchymov, a radon spa town in the northern Czech Republic. Drawing on ethnographic research, family archives, and poetic analysis, this paper follows the process of radioactivity becoming a "homely" part of everyday life.
Long abstract:
This paper looks at the palimpsestic landscape of radioactive exposure in Jáchymov, a radon spa town in the northern Czech Republic. The spas, frequented by medical tourists from the former USSR seeking relief from inflammatory autoimmune conditions, are supplied by the gaseous byproducts of decaying uranium ore from the nearby Svornost uranium mine. In Jáchymov and the surrounding area, radiation produces a haptic topology: a contact surface between the chaotic decay of subterranean energies and the bodies that have absorbed, rejected, or reluctantly harnessed them. This paper describes the process by which radioactive material unearthed in moments of imperial violence becomes re-integrated into everyday life, the unheimlich (uncanny/unhomely) essence obscured within heimlich (homely) bodies and landscapes. I argue that the Uncanny affect of radioactive decay exemplifies how violent afterlives become “homely,” through cycles of re-appropriation, ambivalence, and complicity. Drawing on ethnographic research and family archives, this piece mimics the process of radioactive decay by unfolding in a resonant, accelerating, and non-linear way, as a set of associations that form links rather than lines.
Emma Pask (University of Chicago)
Short abstract:
This paper follows the recent negotiation of public health protocols at the Huntsville Prison due to the million bats that live in one of its warehouses. In doing so, it asks how health – of animals, Texans, and the state as a whole – is configured around issues of “exposure.”
Long abstract:
A dilapidated cotton warehouse owned by Huntsville Prison in East Texas became the home to over a million bats in the 1990s. This state-protected urban bat colony, its accumulation of guano, and its reservoir of zoonotic diseases now exposes the town residents and the men imprisoned across the street to a looming public health crisis. Meanwhile, as unlivable heat worsens every summer, the inmates are denied air-conditioning and animal migratory patterns are drastically altered, but only the bats are advocated for by the state of Texas.
This paper follows the recent negotiation of public health protocols at the Huntsville Prison. With the emergence of the “OneHealth” program, a framework for public health proposed by The Lancet, scientists are finding new terms for thinking about health-in-relation between humans-environments-and-animals in Texas. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Huntsville, I explore the way scientists navigate the boundaries of human life and wildlife, species and race, prisoners and pests, and protection and threat, all while rearranging health – of animals, Texans, and the state as a whole –around issues of “exposure.”
OneHealth is a framework for exposure that delineates its relational terms both from the top-down (as a framework advocated for by the international community) and from the bottom-up (as it applies techniques from local public health traditions and counter-traditions). It assumes exposure is a shared—and maybe inevitable— condition. This paper thus uses the prison to reveal the strange, situated logics of exposure and uses the OneHealth framework to consider exposure’s troubling ambivalence.
Rebecca Witter (Appalachian State University) Dana Powell (Taipei Medical University) Mollie Donovan Ben Pluska (Appalachian State University) Danielle Koonce (University of Maryland)
Short abstract:
Drawing from the co-theorizations of a university-community partnership, we examine how environmental justice activists trouble settler logics of science, regulation, and procedure in a series of public commentaries about industrialized bioenergy development in the southeastern United States.
Long abstract:
Eastern North Carolina (USA) is home to millions of hogs who generate billions of gallons of excrement annually in these lowland, inner coastal plains. Precariously contained in industrialized waste “lagoons,” the excrement contributes to negative human and environmental impacts that are disproportionately distributed among predominantly African-American, Indigenous, and low-wealth communities. In 2020 energy company, Align RNG, secured a contract to install methane-capture technology on industrial hog operations. A confluence of “big pork” and “big energy”, advocates champion industrialized biogas development as a “renewable” energy infrastructure that would mitigate climate emergency while making the toxic hog waste environmentally more palatable and economically profitable. The NC Department of Environmental Quality hosted a series of regulatory public meetings that mark the roll out of biogas development. Event ethnography of these meetings revealed settler logics of science, regulation, and procedure. Settler science relies on the allowance, rather than prevention, of pollution; settler regulation hinges on industry promises to install superior technologies – promises evaded for decades; and settler procedure turns to non-responsiveness when public comments are deemed beyond the scope of science and regulation. State agency meetings have been widely attended, however, by environmental justice activists who exposed and troubled these logics. In strictly-timed three-minute public commentaries, they introduced key touchstones for justice according to Black and Indigenous ecologies. Drawing from the co-theorizations of the Eastern North Carolina Environmental Justice Collaborative (“EJ Co-Lab”), we examine a series of “democratic encounters” between state regulatory logics and grassroots pursuits of rural environmental justice.
Ember McCoy (University of Michigan)
Short abstract:
Using a case study of air pollution activism in Southwest Detroit, this paper discusses the ways in which resident-activists produce counter knowledge to challenge scientific and technical ways of knowing ‘safety’ in U.S. air pollution regulation and monitoring.
Long abstract:
Southwest Detroit residents have advocated against the area’s 50+ polluting corporations and their regulatory bodies for decades. Michigan is one of the few U.S. states with a dedicated environmental justice (EJ) office in its environmental agency and nearby University of Michigan is the first institution with an academic program in EJ; both collaborate with local air pollution resident-activists, who have built long-term working relationships with state bureaucrats and a swath of academic experts. These partnerships led to the culmination of the first state-owned air monitor in residential Detroit. Yet, despite these successes and the 30 years of EJ advocacy and scholarship in the community, residents invariably do not feel heard by technical and policy elites. They continue to assert that their knowledge of air pollution is not captured by trusted state – technical and quantitative – ways of monitoring and evaluation.
Using this case study of air pollution activism in Southwest Detroit, this paper discusses the disconnect between technical, state-driven ways of knowing pollution and embodied, community-driven knowledge. In doing so, I articulate how and why resident-activists produce counter knowledge to disrupt scientific and technical ways of knowing ‘safety’ in U.S. air pollution regulation and monitoring. This work builds on investigations of how lay activists use citizen science to challenge environmental policies and break ‘expertise barriers’ (Ottinger, 2010; Parthasarathy, 2010), by discussing non-technical methods activist deploy (journaling, shareholder activism, storytelling, lawsuits) to articulate their own ways of knowing exposure and contest scientific findings that don’t validate their concerns and needs.
Hiroko Kumaki (Oberlin College)
Short abstract:
The paper discusses the emergence of an expertise of intra-mediation after Fukushima. It argues that epistemic justice is not enough. Civic justice that engages everyday decision making of diverse publics is necessary to address the everyday stakes and concerns of the exposed public.
Long abstract:
In the years following the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Accident in 2011, citizen science flourished across Japan. The seeming democratization of knowledge surrounding radiation exposure, however, did not necessarily allow citizens to affect policy decisions, nor did it provide them with clear answers on how to deal with and live well with exposure. Drawing on insights from STS, scientific and medical experts in Japan have shifted their emphasis from acknowledging and facilitating Public Understanding of Science in order to affect science and policy, to emphasizing the need for “Expert Understanding of the Public” to support the public in their everyday decision-making. Based on ethnographic research in Japan, this paper discusses the emergence of expertise of “intra-mediation” in Japan after Fukushima and discusses its forms and limitations. I argue that democratization of knowledge through epistemic justice is not enough. Civic justice that engages everyday decision making of diverse publics is necessary to address not only exposure but the political structure that often leaves out the everyday stakes and concerns of the exposed public.
Helen Lambert (University of Bristol) Amishi Panwar (University of Bristol)
Short abstract:
This paper explores the the mobilization of expert, government, industry, and citizen knowledges in attempts to establish standards for regulating antibiotic pollution in the environment around pharmaceutical manufacturing hubs.
Long abstract:
Residues from industry waste and from human and agricultural overuse have led to antibiotic pollution of local water bodies in the pharmaceutical manufacturing hub of Baddi, raising concerns about increasing Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) in human and animal pathogens. This paper explores the mobilization of expert, government, industry, and citizen knowledges in establishing standards for regulating Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) in the environment. In 2020, the Government of India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change published a draft notification that proposed PNEC (Predicted No Effect Concentration) values to limit pharmaceutical industry effluents, as advocated by the AMR Industry Alliance. Following protests from local manufacturers, PNEC limits were not included in the final version of their regulations. Having conducted their own testing at effluent outlet points in Baddi, the Veterans Forum, an NGO, launched an appeal to the National Green Tribunal and submitted a case against the State Pollution Control Board for not taking adequate action to limit APIs. However, the appropriateness of PNEC values, established under laboratory conditions, for determining exposure limits is contested among environmental scientists. Drawing on a project investigating human exposure to pharmaceutical industry waste including ethnography and observation at local manufacturing and waste disposal sites, interviews with pharmaceutical managers, bureaucrats, and community members in Baddi, and national scientific and stakeholder meetings, we explore the troubling of environmental exposure measures in a setting where occupation, living conditions, geographical location and waste disposal practices drive unequal distributions of exposure to antibiotics and AMR.
Rachel Bergmann (Stanford University)
Short abstract:
This paper considers one labor union’s campaign to develop, evaluate, and eventually certify “union-approved” IT equipment in the 1980s as a case of transnational, labor-centric environmental knowledge practices within a context of information technology and multinational corporate capitalism.
Long abstract:
As personal computers transformed many white-collar workplaces in the 1980s, a host of new health-related concerns emerged: as Laine Nooney (2022) outlines, personal computers were breaking the human body with repetitive strain injury, eye discomfort, and fears of electromagnetic radiation from video display terminals. How did office workers around the world respond to these new working conditions? In Sweden, where union membership was at an all-time high, labor unions were tasked with evaluating the danger of these new tools and bargaining for safer conditions. TCO, Sweden’s union of white-collar workers, decided to negotiate with the electronics manufacturers themselves. This paper considers TCO’s campaign to develop, evaluate, and eventually certify “union-approved” IT equipment as a case of transnational, labor-centric knowledge practices operating within a context of information technology and multinational corporate capitalism. TCO created tools like “Screen Checker,” translated into nine languages, for employees to evaluate certain exposures and contact manufacturers to request information about others. By the mid-1990s, TCO had successfully influenced several of the world’s largest electronics companies—including IBM, Samsung, and Nokia—to manufacture products that followed stricter health and environment guidelines. Drawing on original archival research, this paper argues that TCO’s tools are instructive for understanding how environmental knowledge practices get embedded in media and technologies.
Roos Metselaar (University of Amsterdam) Sam van der Lugt (University of Amsterdam) René Nissen (University of Amsterdam)
Short abstract:
Providing scientific information on safe PFAS exposure levels may not lead to citizens making ‘choices’ that health authorities intend to promote, but instead to new troubles. Our auto-ethnographic experiment explores how public information about toxic chemicals falls into everyday practices.
Long abstract:
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) advises a maximum intake of Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) – a toxic, persistent, and bioaccumulating pollutant – of 4.4 nanograms per kg of body weight per week. National health authorities translate this value into information that supposedly enables citizens to make ‘responsible choices’ to limit exposure. Distributing information thus aims to care for the health of citizens without compromising their freedom. This approach follows a linear model of decision-action: (1) value-neutral knowledge about pollution is collected, (2) relevant values are weighed, and (3) subsequent action is taken. Our previous ethnographic research with swimmers, eaters, fishers, and gardeners living near a fluorochemical plant in The Netherlands shows, however, that more information about PFAS does not help make better decisions but creates new troubles to grapple with. To understand what is going wrong as official information meets practical concerns, we embarked on the auto-ethnographic experiment of trying to follow public guidance on PFAS exposure for one week. Our experiences while aiming to follow guidelines illustrate troubles with modeling a population as rational decision-makers: (1) scientific knowledge does not map onto the messy realities of practice; (2) our practical dealings with PFAS are best described as ‘juggling’ and ‘keeping afloat,’ (not ‘weighing’ or ‘choosing’); and (3) action does not follow (only) decisions but (also) many practical-material complexities at hand. This raises questions for authorities seeking to care for affected communities – and urges them to think beyond the ‘decision-making citizen’ as the figure to care for.
Cynthia Browne (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
Short abstract:
Epistemic cultures involving the tracing of radioactive isotopes have not only contributed to conceptualizing the environment as a cyclical ecosystem; they also helped to reveal chokepoints of accumulation among indigenous tribes in Alaska and Scandinavia in the 1960s.
Long abstract:
With the emergence of radioactive isotopes as part of experimental systems in the 20th century science, practitioners acquired a new space of representation that allowed metabolic pathways to be mapped by spatializing temporal processes as a cycle. Within recent developments in epigenetics, this new epistemic space within molecular biology not only opened up possibilities for rethinking metabolism as a regulatory interface at the level of the body and its molecular politics; it also enabled a “molecularization” of the environment produced in and through experimental models of exposure (Landecker 2011)
This paper draws upon this notion of the “molecularization” of the environment to trace two trajectories: 1) it explores how tracing technologies helped to “molecularize” ecosystems as cyclical, homeostatic systems through an experimental culture that released radioisotopes into surroundings in order to follow them, and 2) how the materialization of radioactive isotopes in Alaska and Sweden in the 1960s instead exposed how the ecology of land-air relations among certain Indigenous groups produced what I call “chokepoints.” Such chokepoints trouble the concept of ecosystem as a harmonious cycle by making visible the uneven and unequal distribution of radioactive isotopes within the “planetary politics” of exposure (Masco 2021) in the wake of above-ground nuclear detonation. Making this exposure public catalyzed acknowledgements of responsibility by scientists and calls for intervention into these communities.
Ben Pluska (Appalachian State University) Rebecca Witter (Appalachian State University) Sherri White-Williamson (Environmental Justice Community Action Network)
Short abstract:
Ethnographic and acoustic data reveal the experiences of residents living near one the most toxic landfills in the US, troubling state regulatory claims that the pollution and the noise are contained.
Long abstract:
Since 1973, the “Green for Life” (GFL) Environmental Holdings Facility has grown in the predominantly Black community of Snow Hill in Sampson County, North Carolina (USA). Today, the 1,315-acre landfill is the largest in the state and the second-highest emitter of methane in the nation. Around 300 trucks transport 4,320 pounds of waste from 73 counties to the landfill daily. The NC Department of Environmental Quality and Sampson County Board of Commissioners have reassured residents that liners, covers, and a leachate collection system contain the garbage, PFAS, and vinyl chloride emitted from the landfill. Yet residents still see, smell, feel, and hear environmental harm. The constant influx of garbage pollutes the soil, water, and air and generates an intrusive industrial soundscape that continually disturbs residents’ sleep and disrupts their quality of life. After years of struggle against the landfill’s development, new permits to diversify the operation threaten to dismantle residents’ dignity. Public hearings observed and listening sessions conducted in 2023 emphasized residents’ concerns about ongoing environmental injustices and prompted a student-led, community-engaged acoustic monitoring project. In this talk, we share the preliminary results of that project aimed at monitoring the location, frequency, and magnitude of garbage truck noises. Our results “trouble” GFL’s claims of containment and demonstrate the promise of sensory knowledge in a context where existing regulatory paradigms evade responsibility for residents’ mental, physical, socio-economic, and cultural well-being. By engaging with ethnographic and sensory data, permitting agencies can move beyond mitigating exposure towards empathetic and responsive environmental policy.