This text explores some of the current barriers to achieving procedural justice (participation in decision making by those affected by it) based on Science and Technology Studies (STS). Examples of some of these fundamental barriers include (i) lack of disclosure of information from industry, and (ii) lack of information available at the time of decision making (making consent to be subject to environmental hazards difficult or impossible. The author argues for proactive, STS-based knowledge generation to combat this.
This text (the introduction to the book Toxic Truths) summarizes the content of the full book while providing context for it through framing the environmental justice movement through the lens of the “post-truth” rhetoric that has been common for the last several years. The introduction argues for critical thought as a crucial antidote to “post-truth politics”, especially in the name of making sure that environmental justice momentum is not forgotten by the short public attention span during the chaotic and complex times we live in. The authors cite the examples of (i) environmental protection defunding under former American president Trump, (ii) the threat to environmental regulation of Brexit, and (iii) exploitation of the Amazon rainforest under Brazilian president Bolsonaro to highlight the recent politics that have muddied the waters of environmental justice and protection. The authors then expand their focus outward to include the interconnected roles of science, politics, and community values in the global fight for environmental justice.
The author’s main argument is two-fold. Acute environmental disasters (e.g., Chernobyl, BP Horizon Spill, Hurricane Katrina) that garnered public attention leave behind legacies of increased support for environmental action and legislation, although the public attention span is often too short for lasting change. At the same time, these disasters have received a disproportionate amount of public attention compared to the many more slow-moving toxicity disasters that affect people in more systematic but often less visible ways. Examples of this disparity include the contrast between the 1984 Bhopal disaster coverage, and the persistent toxicity in the area in the time since then in the form of industrial waste and infrastructure that is not maintained. It is additionally important to note that the cases that don’t receive much attention often affect marginalized groups (by race, socioeconomics) disproportionately.
The authors review literature on the datafication of health, which they identify as the way through which health has been quantified on a number of different scales and registers. They focus primarily on the datafication of health in clinical health care and self-care practices, rather than medical research and public health infrastructures. From this literature, they identify three key themes: datafied power (the ways through which data permeates and exerts power over forms of life), living with data (focused on datafication as an intimate form of surveillance, and a technology of the self), and data-human mediations (which emphasizes the nonhuman elements mediating datafication dynamics and experiences—such as algorithms, data infrastructure and data itself).
In examining literature on datafied power, the authors acknowledge a lack of scholarship on understanding data and datafication in terms agency, rather than simply power and domination. For instance, data is sometimes mobilized in “creative and even pioneering ways (Rapp 2016)” (265).
They describe literature on “living with data” as increasingly focus examining the social, narrative, and affective dimensions of data practices and experiences (e.g. work on the “Quantified Self,” a group seeking self-knowledge through numbers – a form of relationality that might be described as datasociality). Some scholars have argued that data can render “‘feelings and problems more tangible and comparable” (Sharon & Zandbergen 2016, p. 11)” (267). Some have also acknowledged as well a “curious resonance between the vision of empowered, resisting individuals that many ethnographers of self-tracking celebrate, and the rhetoric of consumer empowerment found in discourses of digital health (Schull 2017, Sharon 2017)” (267).
The literature on data-human mediations emphasizes the agency, liveliness and/or performativity of nonhuman elements—essentially, how they structure and shape the possibilities for action. For instance: “as social expectations of normality and health become embedded in tracking devices’ target numbers, presentation of scores, and gamified incentives (Depper & Howe 2017, Whitson 2013), a “numerical ontology” comes to suffuse everyday practices and “the ways in which people relate to their own bodies” (Oxlund 2012, p. 53; see also Jethani 2015, p. 40)” (269). Perspectives and action can be enabled or disabled by wide variety of factors: the design and performativity of data technology software (user interface, operational and analytical algorithms), hardware (devices, sensors), data itself (as illustrated in different ways), and data infrastructures (labs, data centers, serve and cloud storage, and networks that organize how data is stored and circulated). An analytically constructive focus in this literature has emerged by applying the concept of “assemblage” as a way of tracing how data moves: “where it flows, where it finds impasses, how algorithms act on it along the way” (270).
Lastly, the authors identify scholarship on “data activism” as an emerging focus on exploring how data technology capacities might be employed to promote social justice, collective action, and political participation, as well as to challenged dominant norms and ideologies: “Individual self-tracking data, for instance, can have social and political potential when it is pooled to identify health inequalities, collective environmental exposure, or disparities in quality of life (Gabrys 2014).” (271)
Drawing on a long career as a Black critical health equity researcher, Bowleg quotes Black feminist Audre Lorde in arguing that the “master’s tools”—in order words, conventional theories and methods—"will never dismantle the master’s house”—intersectional structures of oppression from which health inequities are produced. Bowleg elaborates by explaining that conventional theories and methods “valorize almost exclusively individualistic and social cognitive approaches (Cochran & Mays, 1993; Weber & Parra-Medina, 2003); ignore the foundational roots of structural and intersectional inequality (Bowleg, 2012, 2020); center White, Western, cisgender male, middle-class, and heterosexual people and their experiences as normative (Henrich et al., 2010); prioritize amelioration, not transformation (Fox et al., 2009a); and view Black people primarily through the lens of deficit or pathology” (237).
Thus Bowleg offers 10 critical lessons for Black and other health equity researchers of color that she links with system and structural-level strategies. Bowleg also cautions that these lessons are risky and could damage one’s academic career—but that it is exactly this kind of risk that is necessary for change. Among these include: embrace critical perspectives, embrace a critical qualitative stance, learn research paradigms (e.g. positivist paradigm = a master’s tool, must learn to counter), foster community-based partnerships and collaborations, and highlight black communities’ strengths, assets, and acts of resistance. Bowledge also encourages researchers to “tell it like it is”: “Epistemological ignorance is one of the master’s most formidable tools. Epistemologies of ignorance refer to the examination of different types of ignorance and their production, maintenance, and functions (Sullivan & Tuana, 2007)” (239). Here, Bowleg emphasizes the importance of language by discussing how it can alternatively reveal or obscure structures of oppression as well as it shapes the nature of research.
Through this guide, Raphael makes a case for ES within EJ research. Particularly, Raphael articulates the value ES in: 1) building scholarly relevance and promoting restorative justice, 2) improving methodological designs in communication research, 3) reaching a wider pool of audiences in ways that are translatable to the public sphere, and 4) prompting greater reflexivity and collaborations by scholars across disciplines. Evidence is cited from a particular case study wherein a collaboration across academic institutions, independent research institutes, and a statewide advocacy organization led to improvements across the four aforementioned spheres for the research project itself. For example, by co-designing materials to increase the visibility and transparency of specialized research on pollution emissions, this collaboration succeeded in relating knowledge around pollution risks and lent strength to a wider organizing campaign to reduce emissions from the Chevron Oil Refinery in Richmond.
Toxic Truths examines the relationship between citizen science and environmental justice in a post-truth age. Debates over science, facts, and values have long been an integral component of environmental justice struggles. However, post-truth politics threaten science in increasingly extreme ways: “rarely have science and expertise been so questioned, diminished, and vulnerable as they are today” (3). Through various case studies, the authors make a case for the significance of science, knowledge, and data as it is produced “by and for ordinary people living with environmental risks and hazards” (3), though they also recognize the limitations of data. They demonstrate how environmental justice activists both challenge and rely on science.
The authors recognize the lack of clear and specific definition for “environmental injustice” or “environmental justice” is part of its enduring appeal, though they pinpoint the crux of the concept as “based on the principle that all people have the right to be protected from environmental threats and to benefit from living in a clean and healthy environment” (4). Disproportionate vulnerabilities to environmental hazards amongst racialized lines has been linked by environmental activism and research to the idea of environmental racism in the United States.
The authors emphasize that despite suggestions that humans have entered a new age of toxicity (“the Anthropocene”), pollution is a product of centuries of unequal social relations. For instance, environmental inequality has come hand in hand with settler colonialism since at least the seventeenth century. Moreover, the authors emphasize that environmental injustice occurs in many different places, in different ways—and that the concept of environmental justice has traveled far beyond its origins in the United States. They seek to represent this global breadth in through case studies from across different countries and continents: “Through these chapters we will see how environmental justice is spatially dispersed, reaching far beyond the confines of the USA and the racialized geographies of the Deep South where the phrase “environmental justice” was first coined (Bullard 1990)” (6).
Davies and Mah also elaborate on what they mean by “justice” in environmental justice. While acknowledging the plurality and diversity of what justice can mean, they focus on three specific forms of justice: distributive (geographical); procedural (participatory); and capabilities (well-being). In elaborating on distributive justice, the authors noted that as environmental justice research and activism has moved beyond the racialized geographies of the United States, there has been a real need to expand notions justice beyond this geographic frame.
Procedural justice focuses on the need to involve those most affected by environmental injustice in decision-making (e.g. in developing, implementing and enforcing laws, regulations and policies). The authors highlight Barbara Allen’s research in southern France as a prime example of this form of justice. They also acknowledge that procedural justice can depend too strongly on the state and the legal system to protect those that are already being injured by the very structures of toxicity that compose the state.
The authors draw on American philosopher Martha Nussbaum and Indian economist Amartya Sen in highlight capabilities as a third form of justice. They define this form of justice as “centered around the ability of individuals to live freely and unhindered in the world” (5). This form of justice is focused on ensuring the wellbeing of a population and people’s ability to live a life they consider worthwhile. However, this form of justice has be criticized for emphasizing too strongly the significance of individual experiences of injustice, rather than providing attention to the wider community and the structural forces that sustain inequality. This aligns with Pulido’s critique of environmental injustice as overly focused on procedure and inattentive to structures of inequality and pollution reduction.
Such criticisms have produced new iterations of environmental justice, focused on “four pillars of critical environmental justice”: attention to intersectional inequality, scale as an importance factor in the production and potentially resolution of environmental injustices, the embeddedness of social inequalities in state power, and the indispensability of people, beings, and things that have been excluded, marginalized, and othered.
The authors turn to the role of science in environmental justice by listing the terms through which this application has been described: citizen science, but also civic science, popular epidemiology, street science, community-based participatory research, and participatory sensing. They describe calls for the democratization of science and expertise as the historical origins of this form of science. Yet they also remain cautiously critical about the capacity of citizen science for enacting environmental justice, noting that public participation must not be viewed as a cure-all for solving environmental inequalities.
“Post-truth” refers to struggles for control over determining what is possible through theories of truth and knowledge. Backlash against the term raises the point that debates over truth have a long history. In examining the role of truth in environmental justice, the authors emphasize the significance of scientific knowledge for making toxic issues visible—as well as the problem of ‘undone science” (Frickel et al. 2010), because of which the health risks of pollution are often overlooked. They argue that the threats science faces in the post-truth age jeopardize the ability to make environmental health claims. And yet they acknowledge that science itself is not enough: “if political structures go unchanged, environmental injustice will persist” (14). This raises the question: “ ‘What kind of science can serve as ‘changeagent’ knowledge – what are the ingredients that can facilitate action?’ (14).
The authors examine the practice of “hot spotting,” a form of surveillance and intervention through which health care systems in the US intensively direct health and social services towards high-cost patients. Health care hot spotting is seen as a way to improve population health while also reducing financial expenditures on healthcare for impoverished people. The authors argue that argue that ultimately hot spotting targets zones of racialized urban poverty—the same neighborhoods and individuals that have long been targeted by the police. These practices produce “a convergence of caring and punitive strategies of governance” (474). The boundaries between the spaces of healthcare and policing have shifted as a “financialized logic of governance has come to dominate both health and criminal justice” (474).
(in my very limited understanding): Spivak offers a critique of the Subaltern Studies collective by "reading with and against the grain" of the texts produced by the collective. I like this overview of the collective's history, key concepts, critiques and an annotated bibliography of their texts. The collective broadly offered a reading of colonialism in the Indian subcontinent which sought to recover a history of the subaltern (which for them is the peasant exploited alike by a colonial and indigenous elite, insurgent against both colonial and feudal domination; derived from Gramsci's Italian peasant) from the colonial archive, even though the voice of the subaltern was noticeably absent in such archives. Their intervention was primarily against an "elite historiography" that had narrated nationalism as an upper-class, upper-caste project, but had failed to represent dissent and resistance from peasant rebellions.
Their consequent move was therefore not only to offer other archives for writing a subaltern history but also to reframe key moments in elite historiography to reveal the presence of the subaltern. This, they thought, would reveal also the presence of a subaltern consciousness and solidarity, which was as much, if not more critical to decolonization in the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere. The Subaltern Studies collective's larger theoretical and political commitment thus centered around the question: How can we read absences of the archive to articulate consciousness and solidarity?
Spivak's object of analysis are the collective's texts. She argues that historans of the subaltern want to give us a theory of change (broader social change but also particular shifts and tensions between feudalism, capitalism, colonialism). But what they end up doing is offering a theory of consciousness in line with Marxist and anti-humanist thought, assuming that collective consciousness, through a recognition that things are not what they seem to be, leads to change.
Spivak argues that this is a strategic move, and that the collective must not abandon the subaltern subject as an object of analysis. But what they need to do is not speak of the subaltern as a monolith, not assume that subaltern consciousness is collective, much less a radical consciousness. Nowhere is this more lucidly expressed than in her analysis of how women are written within the collective's texts, where they are present but as passive objects of exchange over and through whose bodies class consciousness formed. It is also present in what I think is her most damning critique of the collective: "the transactional quality of interconflicting metropolitan sources often eludes the (post)colonial intellectual". Spivak is calling out the collective for not reading/citing other scholars who also attempt to articulate a radical anti-hegemonic consciousness. This is the double bind of the subaltern for Spivak: capturing it with careful historiographic work at the same time pointing to its absence. For Spivak this is not a point of paralysis, but a point to start from, acknowledging that there is no way out of the inadequacy of representation.
In Climate Leviathan, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright speculate about the future “in a serious way,” drawing on a wide range of theory to sketch four possible governance scenarios, experimenting with scenarios as a genre for critical political thought. The authors assume that the governments and societies of the world will fail to mobilize fast enough to mitigate climate change, resulting in numerous and massive social, political economic, and cultural disruptions. They then analyze contemporary geopolitical trends in order to generate four different modes of governance that might take hold, at a global level, in order to respond and manage that state of affairs.
The scenario they deem most likely, which they call “Climate Leviathan,” imagines the rise of a global sovereignty that addresses and manages climate change through some form of liberal capitalism. The emergence of this sovereignty, however, is contingent on Climate Leviathan winning out over two antagonistic ideologies and governance forms. One, “Climate Behemoth,” is described as a reactionary and national-capitalistic resistance to the Leviathan’s global hegemony and appeal to rational governance. “Climate Mao,” by contrast, is an anti-capitalist but autocratic counter-hegemony. Finally, the authors also pose “Climate X,” named after Walter Benjamin’s Thesis X (in Theses on the Concept of History) depicted as an anti-capitalist, anti-sovereign alternative to the former three.