Despite growing understanding of plastics as a problem (talked about as the “new coal”), plastics production is expanding worldwide, fueled by a boom in cheap shale oil and gas. In response, multiple generations of environmental activists are now working together on issues that were dealt with quite separately just a few years ago (ocean garbage and production of basic petrochemicals, for example).
Working with a wide array of data types (company records and community air monitoring outputs, for example), knowledge infrastructures (government datasets and community archives, for example), and organizations (museums and schools, for example), plastics activists are developing new ways of collectively representing next-generation environmental problems.
My ethnographic project investigates the data practices, data ideologies, and data infrastructures of environmental activists in Texas, Louisiana, and Taiwan who are organizing against Formosa Plastics, a Taiwanese petrochemical company with global reach. My focus is on deep variation among these activists, and how this shapes their modes of working together.
When complete, the study will advance understanding of how intersectional, multi-scalar, "informated" civic knowledge is produced, evaluated, and parlayed into action. The ethnographic Formosa Plastics Global Archive this project will build serves as a model for forward-looking, creative, and collaborative anthropological data management.
