“Not only is the history of environmental justice temporally deep, it is also geographically diverse and still expanding. Any account of environmental jus- tice will therefore remain incomplete, not least because it is still being written. Right now, across the world, thousands of communities are embroiled in the midst of ongoing toxic struggles. Environmental justice also belies its seemingly American past, and today it is increasingly clear that “the concept has travelled to different places” (Holifield et al. 2018, 2). Despite scholarly work on envi- ronmental justice remaining skewed toward American case studies (Reed and George 2011), many scholars have demonstrated how issues of environmental justice are truly global in nature (Walker 2009a; Armiero and Sedrez 2014; Guha 2014; Pellow 2018).” (6)
“A further body of environmental justice research places justice as a procedural concern. This form of environmental justice was born out of participatory democracy, and places the focus of justice squarely on access to decision making and accurate information upon which to base decisions (Yenneti and Day 2015). … This move from a distributional to a procedural logic of justice, which involves public hearings and access to reliable information, is predicated on the redistribution of power relations (Pellow 2018).” (8)
“Within the radical science movement tradition, citizen science emerged out of calls for the democratization of science and expertise to include perspectives from wider publics (Irwin 1995). For decades, scholars of science and technology studies (STS) have argued that scientific expertise is highly political and embed- ded in power relations (Irwin 1995; Epstein 1996; Fischer 2000; Frickel et al. 2010).” (11)
"Many environmental justice scholars have embraced the term “citizen science” as a way of describing community-based participatory science to tackle toxic problems (Ottinger 2017; Martinez-Alier et al. 2016; Gabrys et al. 2016). Other environmental justice researchers use different terms for similar practices, including “civic science” (Fortun and Fortun 2005; Wylie 2018), “popular epidemiology” (Brown 1993), “street science” (Corburn 2005), “community-based participatory research” (Allen; Brown et al.; Rhodes et al.; Shamasunder et al., this volume), and “participatory sensing” (Loreto et al. 2017), among others. Wylie (2018) proposes that “civic science” could help to distinguish between grassroots-led and professional science-led kinds of citizen science, and also to get away from the language of “citizens.” We recognize the limitations of citizen science as a concept, but we nonetheless use this term as a shorthand description for a wide range of public engagements with science within environmental justice struggles." (Mah & Davies, 2021, 10)