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Short abstract:

This paper explores the tensions between “epistemic corruption” and “epistemic inequality” through a case study of environmental site investigation reports commissioned by the Rhode Island (USA) Department of Environmental Management.

Long abstract:

This talk explores the conceptual and empirical tensions between “epistemic corruption” and “epistemic inequality” in the private production of public knowledge. I draw evidence from the nearly 3,000 environmental site investigation reports commissioned by the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (RIDEM) since 1980. The reports represent the state’s cumulative knowledge of soil contamination across the state. Each report summarizes a particular site’s land use history, describes the current conditions of the lot, presents results from chemical analysis of soil and groundwater samples, outlines site remediation plans and lists restrictions on future site reuse. Although most site investigations are managed by RIDEM, they represent the collective work of dozens of private entities who are key players in New England’s burgeoning environmental services industry. Because they are tied to real estate transactions, state-sponsored knowledge about soil contamination tends to concentrate in neighborhoods where real estate markets are dynamic, but accumulates more slowly in areas that are economically depressed or in neighborhoods blighted by poverty, industrial decline, and institutional neglect. In this way, entrenched social and environmental inequalities are accompanied – and likely reinforced – by a type of state-sanctioned epistemic inequality, in which some neighborhoods consistently generate more regulatory attention and knowledge than others in ways that map onto the ebb and flow of property values in commercial real estate markets. I argue that epistemic corruption is characteristic of knowledge systems whose legitimacy is dependent on economically powerful actors that, in this case, value some soils (and some people) more than others.