EASST 2022 Talk: Advocacy after Formosa

Talk recording 

Abstract:
STS research in diverse communities near petrochemical plants has emphasized the importance of "civic data" (Wiley et al. 2017) - i.e. data that is freely available and organized to be useful in characterizing and addressing environmental health problems. Work to move beyond environmental injustice is multi-faceted and extensive in time. Legal actions to address environmental injustice cases are critical, but are best seen as flashpoints - with deep work ahead and behind them, at multiple scales. Across settings, there are important data gaps but also large amounts of data collected by activists over years of work. Often this data is stored in activists' homes in analog form, inaccessible to others working on related issues. As activists begin to digitize their records for advocacy campaigns and public repositories, this raises questions about the need for civic data infrastructure, and ho! w such in frastructure should be designed, governed, and sustained going forward. This paper explores the civic data ideologies, practices, and infrastructures of environmental activists in Texas, Louisiana, Taiwan, and Vietnam that are organizing against Formosa Plastics, one of the world's largest petrochemical companies. The analysis will focus on how the digitization and transnational sharing of legal documents is shaped by the temporalities of lawsuits (from clean water citizen suits to toxic tort cases) but also new forms and emerging ideals of civic knowledge demonstrated by contemporary plastics activists. Drawing on the development of the Formosa Plastics Global Archive, the talk will open a discussion of how STS researchers keep up with increasingly complex problems and speed of digitization to support enhanced collaboration both among researchers and with the communities they study.