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Seeking justice in risk landscapes. Small data and toxic autobiographies from an Italian petrochemical town (Gela, Sicily)
Abstract
This paper provides a re-signification of industrial risk as a slow-burning issue (Mah [2017] “Environmental justice in the age of big data: challenging toxic blind spots of voice, speed, and expertise.” Environmental Sociology 3 (2): 122–133.), invisibly and violently diffusing across time and space and affecting relational entanglements between human and non-human components of risk landscapes. As an alternative to a planning approach based on quantitative and objective data, the authors propose to build strategic planning of riskscapes upon what they call small data, that is, the ensemble of qualitative and embodied data that can be gathered through street science (Corburn [2005]. Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice. Cambridge: MIT Press.) and toxic autobiographies (Armiero et al. [2019]. “Toxic Bios: Toxic Autobiographies – A Public Environmental Humanities Project.” Environmental Justice, 1–5. ). In order to discuss the potential role of both small data and toxic autobiographies in the planning field, the authors present the results of an ongoing empirical case study in Gela, a Sicilian town converted into one of the main Italian petrochemical poles in the 1960s by a multinational oil company. The authors analyse Gela’s risk landscapes through the perceptions of citizens and their initiatives to tackle environmental injustices. Finally, the authors argue that small data can provide a better understanding of the landscape of risk through four lenses that allow seeing the slow and diffused change brought by industrial risk: memories of injustice, memories of smell, trans-corporeal stories, and relational stories.
... When applying a cultural lens to the study of health, immigration scholars urge us to move beyond the framework of "acculturation" and instead bring together issues of structural racism, intersectionality and health vulnerability with immigrants' understandings and everyday practices (Verloo, 2013;Viruell-Fuentes et al., 2012). To begin with, this would require a recognition of historically produced climate, environmental and health injustices, as the long-lasting phenomena to be found in the everydayness of risk landscapes, constituted by "slow burning issues and slow disasters" (Privitera et al., 2021). Second, and relatedly, it would also mean seeing knowledge about climate health risk-vulnerability to it and adaptive capacity to resist it-as something performed in the everyday, as constructed and contested through subjective identities and relationships that hinge on power relations along lines of gender, class, nation and ethnicity, among others (Cote & Nightingale, 2012), and as memory and embodiment of risk. ...
... Insights gleaned from our research findings may be relevant beyond air pollution control policies. Consistent with prior research on street science (Corburn, 2005;Privitera et al., 2021;Smith et al., 2022;Barry, 2022;Corburn et al., 2022), this study provides further evidence supporting the necessity for policymakers and urban planners to relinquish the "deficit" model of citizen participation. Assuming that the public is ignorant and needs to be educated on environmental issues strips urban environmental policy of the "contextual intelligence" that only residents possess (Corburn, 2005). ...
The design of air pollution control policies is a complex decision-making process. Public participation can enhance the legitimacy and effectiveness of environmental urban regulations but does not always occur naturally. This article presents the experience of the use of role-playing in six mid-sized cities in southern Chile to evaluate how residents affected by high concentrations of fine particulate matter perceive the problem and debate possible solutions. For this, the participants were asked to assume the role of advisors. On that premise, they had to prioritize between a series of mitigation measures and reach a consensus with other advisors. The results show the potential of role-playing games, on the one hand, to promote critical thinking and argument skills among the general public and, on the other, to help policymakers in the design of more operative and fair plans of action.
... Many critical environmental justice scholars have noted how planning for sustainable and just cities could benefit from the "small data", that is, the empirical accounts and relational stories of people whose health and wellbeing have been at stake considering environmental change (Privitera, Armiero, and Gravagno 2021). "Street science" is the term Corburn (2005) gave to the concerns of lay publics, especially low-income populations and people of color who have historically been most vulnerable to environmental and climate health risks. ...
This book uses a unique typology of ten core drivers of injustice to explore and question common assumptions around what urban sustainability means, how it can be implemented, and how it is manifested in or driven by urban interventions that hinge on claims of sustainability.
Aligned with critical environmental justice studies, the book highlights the contradictions of urban sustainability in relation to justice. It argues that urban neighbourhoods cannot be greener, more sustainable and liveable unless their communities are strengthened by the protection of the right to housing, public space, infrastructure and healthy amenities. Linked to the individual drivers, ten short empirical case studies from across Europe and North America provide a systematic analysis of research, policy and practice conducted under urban sustainability agendas in cities such as Barcelona, Glasgow, Athens, Boston and Montréal, and show how social and environmental justice is, or is not, being taken into account. By doing so, the book uncovers the risks of continuing urban sustainability agendas while ignoring, and therefore perpetuating, systemic drivers of inequity and injustice operating within and outside of the city.
Accessibly written for students in urban studies, critical geography and planning, this is a useful and analytical synthesis of issues relating to urban sustainability, environmental and social justice.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003221425, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Funded by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Table of Contents
Driver 1: Material and Livelihood Inequalities
Driver 2: Racialized or Ethnically Exclusionary Urbanization
Driver 3: Uneven Urban and Intensification and Regeneration
Driver 4: Uneven Environmental Health and Pollution Patterns
Driver 5: Exclusive Access to the Benefits of Urban Sustainability Infrastructure
Driver 6: Unfit Institutional Structures
Driver 7: Weakened Civil Society
Driver 8: Limited Citizen Participation
Driver 9: Power-Knowledge Asymmetries
Driver 10: The Growth Imperative and Neoliberal Urbanism
The book is fully open access here: https://www.routledge.com/Injustice-in-Urban-Sustainability-Ten-Core-Drivers/Kotsila-Anguelovski-Garcia-Lamarca-Sekulova/p/book/9781032117621
... Many critical environmental justice scholars have noted how planning for sustainable and just cities could benefit from the "small data", that is, the empirical accounts and relational stories of people whose health and wellbeing have been at stake considering environmental change (Privitera, Armiero, and Gravagno 2021). "Street science" is the term Corburn (2005) gave to the concerns of lay publics, especially low-income populations and people of color who have historically been most vulnerable to environmental and climate health risks. ...
This critical review explores the evolution of environmental justice research, highlighting the transition from a primary focus on the distribution of environmental "goods" and "bads" to a multidimensional approach that includes recognition, participation, and socio-historical analysis. The review evaluates empirical studies, categorizing them into quantitative and qualitative methods, and assesses their strengths and limitations. While quantitative research has been instrumental in mapping spatial inequalities, it often fails to capture the socio-historical and structural processes that shape environmental injustices. On the other hand, while qualitative methods have added depth by capturing lived experiences and complex socio-political dynamics, they often lack the ability to address spatial patterns systematically. The separation of these approaches has limited the field's ability to fully understand environmental justice. To bridge these gaps, the contribution proposes a framework for a new generation of environmental justice (EJ) scholars, advocating for mixed-methods research and the adoption of a critical geographical perspective. This integrated approach aims to offer a comprehensive understanding of environmental justice, encompassing distribution, recognition, participation, and other possible dimensions, thereby enhancing both academic insight and practical policy impact.
Background:
The open science movement is transforming scientific practice with the goal of enhancing the transparency, productivity, and reproducibility of research. Nevertheless, transparency is a complex concept, and efforts to promote some forms of transparency may do relatively little to advance other important forms of transparency.
Objectives:
Drawing from the literature in history, philosophy, and sociology of science, we aim to distinguish between different forms of scientific transparency. Our goal is to identify strategies for achieving forms of transparency that are relevant not only to scientists but also to decision makers and members of the public.
Discussion:
We draw a distinction between "scientifically relevant transparency" and "socially relevant transparency." Most of the prominent strategies associated with the open science movement (e.g., making data publicly available and registering studies) are designed primarily to promote scientifically relevant transparency. To achieve socially relevant transparency, which is particularly important in fields like environmental health, further steps are needed to provide scientific information in ways that are relevant to decision makers and members of the public.
Conclusions:
Promoting socially relevant transparency will require a range of activities by many different individuals and institutions. We propose an array of strategies that can be pursued by scientists and other scholars, journals, universities, funders, government agencies, and members of the public. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP4808.
Industrial development in India has rarely been studied through the perspective of environmental justice (EJ) such that the association between industrial development and significant economic and social inequalities remains to be examined. Our article addresses this gap by focusing on Gujarat in western India, a leading industrial state that exemplifies the designation of India as an “emerging economy.” We link the geographic concentration of industrial facilities classified as major accident hazard (MAH) units, further subdivided by size (large or medium/small) and ownership (public or private), to the socio-demographic composition of the population at the subdistrict (taluka) level. Generalized estimating equations (GEEs) are used to analyze statistical associations between MAH unit density and explanatory variables related to the economic and social status of the residential population at the subdistrict level. Our results indicate a significant relationship between presence of socially disadvantaged populations (Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes) and density of all types of MAH units, except those associated with the public sector. Higher urbanization and lower home ownership are also found to be strong predictors of MAH unit density. Overall, our article represents an important step towards understanding the complexities of environmental inequalities stemming from Gujarat’s industrial economy.
The health impact on populations residing in industrially contaminated sites (CSs) is recognized as a public health concern especially in relation to more vulnerable population subgroups. The aim of this study was to estimate the risk of congenital anomalies (CAs) in Italian CSs. Thirteen CSs covered by regional CA registries were investigated in an ecological study. The observed/expected ratios (O/E) with 90% confidence intervals (CI) for the total and specific subgroups of CAs were calculated using the regional areas as references. For the CSs with waste landfills, petrochemicals, and refineries, pooled estimates were calculated. The total number of observed cases of CAs was 7085 out of 288,184 births (prevalence 245.8 per 10,000). For some CSs, excesses for several CA subgroups were observed, in particular for genital and heart defects. The excess of genital CAs observed in Gela (O/E 2.36; 90% CI 1.73-3.15) is consistent with findings from other studies. For CSs including petrochemical and landfills, the pooled risk estimates were 1.10 (90% CI 1.01-1.19) and 1.07 (90% CI 1.02-1.13), respectively. The results are useful in identifying priority areas for analytical investigations and in supporting the promotion of policies for the primary prevention of CAs. The use of short-latency effect indicators is recommended for the health surveillance of the populations residing in CSs.
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Oral history has much to offer environmental history, yet the possibilities and promises of oral history remain underutilized in environmental history and environmental studies more broadly. Through a reflection on work in environmental history and associated disciplines, this paper presents a case for the strength and versatility of oral history as a key source for environmental history, while reflecting on questions of its reliability and scope. We identify three major insights provided by environmental oral history: into environmental knowledge, practices, and power. We argue that rather than being a weakness, the (inter)subjective and experiential dimensions of oral accounts provide a rich source for situating and interrogating environmental practices, meanings, and power relations. Oral history, moreover, provides a counterweight to a reliance on colonial archives and top-down environmental accounts, and can facilitate a renewal—and deepening—of the radical roots of environmental history. Furthermore, as a research practice, oral history is a promising means of expanding the participatory and grassroots engagement of environmental history. By decentring environmental expertise and eroding the boundaries (both fictive and real) of environmental knowledge production, oral environmental histories can provide key interventions in pursuit of a more just, sustainable world.
Residents of rapidly industrializing rural areas in China live with pollution every day. Villagers drink obviously tainted water and breathe visibly dirty air, afflicted by a variety of ailments—from arthritis to nosebleeds—that they ascribe to the effects of industrial pollution. “Cancer villages,” village-sized clusters of high cancer incidence, have emerged as a political and cultural phenomenon. In Resigned Activism, Anna Lora-Wainwright explores the daily grind of living with pollution in rural China and the varying forms of activism that develop in response. She finds that claims of health or environmental damage are politically sensitive, and that efforts to seek redress are frustrated by limited access to scientific evidence, growing socioeconomic inequalities, and complex local realities. Villagers, feeling powerless, often come to accept pollution as part of the environment; their activism is tempered by their resignation.
Lora-Wainwright uses the term “resigned activism” as a lens through which to view villagers’ perceptions and the diverse forms of environmental engagement that result. These range from picketing at the factory gate to quieter individual or family-oriented actions. Drawing on her own extensive fieldwork, Lora-Wainwright offers three case studies of “resigned activism” in rural China, examining the experiences of villagers who live with the effects of phosphorous mining and fertilizer production, lead and zinc mining, and electronic waste processing. These cases make clear the staggering human costs of development and the deeply uneven distribution of costs and benefits that underlie China’s economic power.
The communities affected by toxic contamination in Campania, Italy, have had to confront the challenge of proving a direct causal connection between exposure to pollutants and health issues, given a long history of mismanagement of waste. Medical studies have been conducted, but the social and political debate is static. In September 2014, the Italian Ministry of Health simply repeated earlier statements that Campania's increasing cancer rates are due to poor lifestyle habits. The article casts light on the politicization of ill bodies of Campania. We analyze three practices of political action and resistance which employed the subjectivization of physical bodies and illnesses to expose environmental injustice affecting communities. In the neighborhood of Pianura, Naples, people gathered medical records as evidence for a trial into 'culpable epidemics.' In the so-called Land of Fires, in the northern periphery of Naples, hundreds of postcards featuring pictures of children killed by rare pathologies were sent to the Italian Head of State and the Pope. Finally, in the town of Acerra, the blood of a dying shepherd became a political object to prove exposure to dioxin contamination in that area. The politicization of illness and bodies conflates the public and private, challenges the mainstream production of knowledge, and proposes an alternative narrative for affected communities and individuals. Nevertheless, the practices of this politicization have differed and are not always 'political', as we will show through the three cases.
Reflexivity is the practice of critical consciousness of one's location and positionality in a research process and how this influences research outcomes and the production of knowledge. It accounts for power relations, subjectivities, epistemology, interpretation of text, and conduct of research methods. Reflecting upon and assessing how one is positioned can enable more conscientious and ethical engagement, be it with people, institutions, or texts. Reflexivity has become increasingly important in research processes in geography. However, it is not without criticism as reflexive acts can be reduced to self-indulgent narratives of the researcher's experience and thus reassert relations of dominance and representation. Reflexivity, however, has the enormous potential to foster ethical research and collaborative research engagement with meaningful impact beyond the academy. Collaborative endeavors can emerge from reflexive research and writing and new avenues of collectivization and empowerment can result.
This paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on the role of academic–practice relationships in contributing to sustainable urban development. We argue that co-production offers a potential pathway for academics to work with policy-makers in moving towards the realisation of more just cities. The paper starts from the position that there is an essential need for, but limit to, critique alone in contributing to the possibility of urban change. Moving towards a shared critique as a basis for future action is an important precondition for realising more just cities, adding weight to the voices arguing for alternative urban visions. These arguments are advanced through a study conducted by academic researchers and policy-makers in the Greater Manchester Low Carbon Hub. The paper outlines a process for working with existing urban institutions within institutional constraints to develop affirmative actions with the aim of longer term transformations. A key contribution is then the identification of eight markers for assessing progress towards the realisation of more just cities.
This book examines the challenges and possibilities of conducting cultural environmental history research today. Disciplinary commitments certainly influence the questions scholars ask and the ways they seek out answers, but some methodological challenges go beyond the boundaries of any one discipline. The book examines: how to account for the fact that humans are not the only actors in history yet dominate archival records; how to attend to the non-visual senses when traditional sources offer only a two-dimensional, non-sensory version of the past; how to decolonize research in and beyond the archives; and how effectively to use sources and means of communication made available in the digital age.
The article examines the conditions required for producing knowledge for just urban sustainability. It highlights a need to review the current social organisation of knowledge within cities and the implications for academic practice – in other words, whose interests are being served? Whose knowledge claims are being supported and justified? The article considers how the knowledge practices of cities and universities often exacerbate urban problems that are perpetuated by a limited imaginary and selectivity. It is argued that a gap exists between the content of knowledge and the context of its application. What is required are new ways of practising collaborative research that do not compromise critique, but open it up to engagement with forms of knowledge that are currently excluded from the representations and categorisations that constitute dominant practices. By bringing the “what” and “how” of knowledge together in a process of active intermediation, it is possible to contribute to more just, sustainable urban futures for the many, not the few.
Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13549839.2016.1233527.
In recent years, grassroots environmental justice activists have increasingly used big data techniques for monitoring, recording, and reporting toxic environmental exposures. Despite the promise of big data for environmental justice, there is a need to address structural barriers to making toxic environmental exposures visible, and to avoid over-relying on new digital methods and techniques as a panacea for problems of voice. The emphasis of real-time analysis in crowdsourced and participatory big data is good at tracking the immediate aftermath of environmental disasters, but it misses slower-burning environmental problems that emerge over time. While big data more generally may have implications for understanding toxic exposure landscapes across different temporal and spatial scales, it is complex, difficult to analyze, and faces significant problems of reliability. There are three key blind spots of the ethos and practice of big data in relation to environmental justice: voice, speed, and expertise. In the context of increasing pressure to embrace new tools and technologies, it is also important to slow down and to reflect on the wider implications of the age of big data.
In this paper I expand upon the recent use of the term " Critical Environmental Justice Studies. " This concept is meant to capture new developments in Environmental Justice (EJ) Studies that question assumptions and gaps in earlier work in the field. Because this direction in scholarship is still in its formative stages, I take this opportunity to offer some guidance on what Critical Environmental Justice (CEJ) Studies might look like and what it could mean for theorizing the relationship between race (along with multiple additional social categories) and the environment. I do so by (1) adopting a multidisciplinary approach that draws on several bodies of literature, including critical race theory, political ecology, ecofeminist theory, and anarchist theory, and (2) focusing on the case of Black Lives Matter and the problem of state violence.
For fifty years (1949–99) the now-abandoned Giant Mine in Yellowknife emitted arsenic air and water pollution into the surrounding environment. Arsenic pollution from Giant Mine had particularly acute health impacts on the nearby Yellowknives Dene First Nation (YKDFN), who were reliant on local lakes, rivers, and streams for their drinking water, in addition to frequent use of local berries, garden produce, and medicine plants. Currently, the Canadian government is undertaking a remediation project at Giant Mine to clean up contaminated soils and tailings on the surface and contain 237,000 tonnes of arsenic dust that are stored underground at the Giant Mine. Using documentary sources and statements of Yellowknives Dene members before various public hearings on the arsenic issue, this paper examines the history of arsenic pollution at Giant Mine as a form of “slow violence,” a concept that reconfigures the arsenic issue not simply as a technical problem, but as a historical agent of colonial dispossession that alienated an Indigenous group from their traditional territory. The long-term storage of arsenic at the former mine site means the effects of this slow violence are not merely historical, but extend to the potentially far distant future.
This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (1) Theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (2) One cannot generalize from a single case, therefore the single case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (3) The case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, while other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (4) The case study contains a bias toward verification; and (5) It is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. The article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and that a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of more good case studies.
SENTIERI Project (Studio Epidemiologico Nazionale dei Territori e degli Insediamenti Esposti a Rischio da Inquinamento) was started in 2007 and completed in June 2010; the results are published in two Supplements in the Italian journal Epidemiologia & Prevenzione. This first Supplement presents the evaluation of the epidemiological evidence on the association between 63 causes of death and selected environmental exposures. Criteria and procedures adopted for the evaluation are described in detail for the sites of national interest for environmental remediation, defined as Italian Polluted Sites (IPS). The second Supplement will present the results of the mortality analysis for the 44 IPSs included in the project, together with comments and forewarnings on further epidemiological characterization of these areas. SENTIERI Project is aimed at assessing IPSs residents' health status through the analysis of mortality for the period 1995-2002, to set priorities in remediation intervention and so prevent environment-related diseases. For the 52 sites defined in 2007 by Italian legislation, data were collected for environmental characterization. Besides landfills, located in 26 IPSs, in the sites qualified for remediation there are many plants producing/using chemicals. Another large group of production settlements is represented by plants in which asbestos and other mineral fibers are utilized. Steel plants, refineries and petrochemicals are similarly distributed throughout the Italian territory. Power plants are mostly found in the Centre and in the South; mines/quarries and harbour areas are in some of the IPSs. Some sites, consisting in districts of large urban areas, were excluded from the study because mortality data were available only at municipal level. Moreover, some of the sites included in the IPSs group, were also excluded mainly because they comprised landfills treating mostly urban/inert wastes, and were placed outside residential areas, therefore they could not pose any human health risk. The total number of sites included in the analysis of SENTIERI project is 44; they are located in 17 Italian Regions; 21 of them are situated in the North, 8 in the Centre and 15 in the South. The decrees defining IPSs boundaries provide also information about the type of production facilities active in the bounded areas. SENTIERI project analyses mortality data by adopting a methodology also used in previous Italian studies of high-risk areas. Mortality was chosen as outcome at study based on the availability and validity of death certificate data at national and local level, even for specific diseases. Exposures for which epidemiological evidence was assessed are distinguished in IPS sources of environmental exposure and other exposures. The former are defined on legislative basis and can affect residents (they are coded as chemicals, petrochemicals and refineries, steel plants, power plants, mines and/or quarries, harbour areas, asbestos or other mineral fibers, landfills and incinerators). The latter (other exposures) were considered for their ascertained health effects. They are: air pollution, active and passive smoking, alcohol intake, occupational exposure and socioeconomic status. SENTIERI Working Group (WG) developed a framework to examine the epidemiological literature; it identifies a hierarchy in the literature sources used to classify each combination of cause of death and exposure in terms of strength of the association. This hierarchy relies on the epidemiological community consensus, on assessments based on the application of standardized criteria, weighting the study design and the occurrence of biased results. Statistical re-analysis, literature review, multi-centric study and single investigation were also considered. Therefore, to put forward the assessment, criteria firstly favoured primary sources and quantitative meta-analysis and, secondly, consistency among sources. The evaluation was based on sources published from 1998 to 2009. According to the above mentioned criteria, the epidemiological evidence of the association between cause of death and exposure was classified in three categories: Sufficient (S), Limited (L) and Inadequate (I). The absence of any sign means that epidemiological data referring to the association between cause of death and exposure are not available in primary sources, quantitative meta-analysis, reviews, multi centric studies and single studies. In the present report a causal association was judged to be present (Sufficient) only for malignant pleural cancer and residence in areas contaminated by asbestos or other mineral fibers and around mines or quarries. Limited evidence for a causal association existed for 17 causes of death and a total of 7 environmental exposures in the polluted area. The evidence was Inadequate for 42 causes of deaths and all sources of environmental exposure. No epidemiological data were available for the remaining cause of death/exposure combinations. It must be pointed out that a larger and more consistent body of epidemiological evidence was available for the association between the causes analysed in SENTIERI and air pollution, smoking, alcohol, socioeconomic status and occupation (other exposures). SENTIERI WG agreed that the epidemiological evaluation of the evidence here bestowed, will be used to comment and interpret results; their reading will focus on the causes of death for which it is established or reasonably assumed an etiological role of the environmental exposures in IPSs, also considering the potential etiologic effect of these other exposures. The added value of the epidemiological evidence evaluation is the chance to categorise the etiological hypotheses persuasiveness when epidemiological studies of polluted sites are carried out. The a priori account of assumptions allows to contain the problems related to post hoc observations and multiple comparisons and, more generally, grants the increase of confidence in interpreting causes for the observed associations. The present Report is the starting point of a multi-disciplinary and multi-phase process leading to a full epidemiological characterisation of polluted areas. Future applications and validations are to be envisaged.
Drawing on twelve compelling international contributions, this important book argues that traditional technocratic ways of designing policy are now inadequate and instead suggests co-production as a more democratic alternative. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students.
While the 'sense of place' is a familiar theme in poetry and art, philosophers have generally given little or no attention to place and the human relation to place. In Place and Experience, Jeff Malpas seeks to remedy this by advancing an account of the nature and significance of place as a complex but unitary structure that encompasses self and other, space and time, subjectivity and objectivity. Drawing on a range of sources from Proust and Wordsworth to Davidson, Strawson and Heidegger, he argues that the significance of place is not to be found in our experience of place so much as in the grounding of experience in place, and that this binding to place is not a contingent feature of human existence, but derives from the very nature of human thought, experience and identity as established in and through place.
Smart cities have begun to garner increasing global popularity and political legitimacy in recent years. Driven largely by corporate interests, smart cities provide highly normative solutions to future urban and economic crises and are now popular in the global north and south alike. Despite a growing critical scholarship on smart cities, the processes and politics through which they manifest in different locations are widely different. Yet, there is a dearth of research on how an understanding of smart cities through the lens of power might contribute to our understanding of contemporary urban theory, citizenship and wider urban transformations. The papers, in this special issue, represent a range of entry points for examining the dynamics of power in the operationalisation of the smart city concept in different contexts. The intention is to examine how smart cities produce and engage power, as a way of normalising the structural and social violence inherent in urban transformations across the world.
In this article, we present Toxic Bios, a public environmental humanities (EH) project that aims to coproduce, gather, and make visible stories of contamination and resistance. To explain the rationale of the project and its potentialities, first we offer a brief reflection on the field of the EH and its (possible) contribution to environmental justice research, then, we illustrate the guerrilla narrative strategy experimented through the project.
When environmental health problems arise in a community, policymakers must be able to reconcile the first-hand experience of local residents with recommendations by scientists. In this highly original look at environmental health policymaking, Jason Corburn shows the ways that local knowledge can be combined with professional techniques to achieve better solutions for environmental health problems. He traces the efforts of a low-income community in Brooklyn to deal with environmental health problems in its midst and offers a framework for understanding "street science"—decision making that draws on community knowledge and contributes to environmental justice.
Like many other low-income urban communities, the Greenpoint/Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn suffers more than its share of environmental problems, with a concentration of polluting facilities and elevated levels of localized air pollutants. Corburn looks at four instances of street science in Greenpoint/Williamsburg, where community members and professionals combined forces to address the risks from subsistence fishing from the polluted East River, the asthma epidemic in the Latino community, childhood lead poisoning, and local sources of air pollution. These episodes highlight both the successes and the limits of street science and demonstrate ways residents can establish their own credibility when working with scientists. Street science, Corburn argues, does not devalue science; it revalues other kinds of information and democratizes the inquiry and decision making processes.
Chemical toxicity is part of everyday life in Puchuncaví. The most polluted industrial compound in Chile, Puchuncaví is home of fourteen industrial complexes, including the largest copper smelting plant in the country and four thermoelectric plants. Stories of biological mutation, corrosion and death among plants, humans, fishes and cattle are proliferate in Puchuncaví. Engaging with the growing interest in care and affective modes of attention within STS, this paper examines how ill, intoxicated or otherwise affected people in Puchuncaví act upon and know about their chronic sufferings. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I focus on what I call ‘hypo-interventions’, or the minimal and unspectacular yet life-enabling practices of caring, cleaning and healing the ailments of their significant others, human and otherwise. By minutely engaging with somatic and affective alterations in the domestic spaces of the body, the home and the garden, Puchuncavinos render industrial harm visible and knowable, and hence a type of political action is invoked. While outside technical validation and alien to conventional politics, these actions have proved crucial for people in Puchuncaví striving to persevere in the face of industrial violence and institutional abandonment. I coin the term ‘intimate activism’ to describe the ethical and political affordances of the subdued doings and engagements deployed in Puchuncaví. Intimate activism, I claim, draws its political power on its capacity to create minimal conditions for ethical and material endurance.
This second edition of a seminal work includes the original text, first published 30 years ago, alongside two major new chapters. Power, Freedom and Reason assesses the main debates about how to conceptualize and study power, including the influential contributions of Michel Foucault. Power Revisited reconsiders Steven Lukes' own views in light of these debates and of criticisms of his original argument. With a new introduction and bibliographical essay, this book will consolidate its reputation as a classic work and a major reference point within social and political theory.
This study focused on the inorganic environmental contaminants in specific food products which form part of the food chain of the population residing in the area of Southern Italy (Gela) where there is a high mortality rate linked to tumor diseases and congenital malformations. Determination of toxic metals was performed by Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS). The toxicological data for every toxic element has been applied to evaluate the risk for the consumer by calculating the amount of potentially toxic element that would ingest an average of 60kg weight individual adult. The analysis of the investigated samples shows a high level of metal contamination which can be linked both to the polluted water and air. The obtained results give us an idea about the agricultural products contamination and possible exposure of local people through the food chain.
Material Ecocriticism offers new ways to analyze language and reality, human and nonhuman life, mind and matter, without falling into well-worn paths of thinking. Bringing ecocriticism closer to the material turn, the contributions to this landmark volume focus on material forces and substances, the agency of things, processes, narratives and stories, and making meaning out of the world. This broad-ranging reflection on contemporary human experience and expression provokes new understandings of the planet to which we are intimately connected.
Notions of ‘co‐production’ are growing in popularity in social science and humanities research on climate change, although there is some ambiguity about the meanings of the term and how it is being used. It is time to critically and reflexively take stock of this expanding area of scholarship. A comprehensive review of over 130 scientific publications first mapped the scholars using co‐production, relative to characteristics like their discipline, nationality, and research themes. Second, it looked at how this diversity of scientific perspectives has opened up a multiplicity of meanings of co‐production. While most discussions of co‐production stop at a basic distinction between descriptive and normative uses of the term, this review unpacked eight conceptual lenses on co‐production, each discernible by its particular emphases, academic traditions, logic, and criteria of success. There are two important implications of this work. On one hand, it urges self‐reflexive transparency when using co‐production concepts. The multiple meanings attached to co‐production add richness to the concept and open it up to different uses. However, it is important that scholars clearly communicate how they use the term and are mindful of what they ‘buy into’ by using the concept in certain ways. On the other hand, there are tensions between the different perspectives as well as opportunities for combining them into a compound concept of co‐production. In this way, co‐production is reconceptualized as a prism, where each aspect allows different but complimentary insights on the relationship between science, society, and nature. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e482. doi: 10.1002/wcc.482
This article is categorized under: Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice
- This paper describes the process of inducting theory using case studies from specifying the research questions to reaching closure. Some features of the process, such as problem definition and construct validation, are similar to hypothesis-testing research. Others, such as within-case analysis and replication logic, are unique to the inductive, case-oriented process. Overall, the process described here is highly iterative and tightly linked to data. This research approach is especially appropriate in new topic areas. The resultant theory is often novel, testable, and empirically valid. Finally, framebreaking insights, the tests of good theory (e.g., parsimony, logical coherence), and convincing grounding in the evidence are the key criteria for evaluating this type of research.
How do we understand the agency and significance of material forces and their interface with human bodies? What does it mean to be human in these times, with bodies that are inextricably interconnected with our physical world? Bodily Natures considers these questions by grappling with powerful and pervasive material forces and their increasingly harmful effects on the human body. Drawing on feminist theory, environmental studies, and the sciences, Stacy Alaimo focuses on trans-corporeality, or movement across bodies and nature, which has profoundly altered our sense of self. By looking at a broad range of creative and philosophical writings, Alaimo illuminates how science, politics, and culture collide, while considering the closeness of the human body to the environment.
A revolutionary new textbook introducing masters and doctoral students to the major research approaches and methodologies in the social sciences. Written by an outstanding set of scholars, and derived from successful course teaching, this volume will empower students to choose their own approach to research, to justify this approach, and to situate it within the discipline. It addresses questions of ontology, epistemology and philosophy of social science, and proceeds to issues of methodology and research design essential for producing a good research proposal. It also introduces researchers to the main issues of debate and contention in the methodology of social sciences, identifying commonalities, historic continuities and genuine differences.
We see the city, we hear the city, but above all: we smell the city.nbsp;Scent has unique qualities: ubiquity, persistence, and an unparalleled connection to memory, yet it has gone overlooked in discussions of sensory design. Whatnbsp;scents shape the city? How doesnbsp;scent contribute to placemaking? How do we design smell environments in the city? Urban Smellscapesnbsp;makes a notable contribution towards the growing body of literature on the senses and design by providing some answers to these questions and contributing towards the wider research agenda regarding how people sensually experience urban environments. It is the first of its kind in examining the role of smell specifically in contemporary experiences and perceptions of English towns and cities, highlighting the perception of urban smellscapes as inter-related with place perception, and describing odour's contribution towards overall sense of place. With case studies from factories, breweries, urban parks, and experimental smell environments in Manchester and Grasse, Urban Smellscapes identifies processes by which urban smell environments are managed and controlled, and gives designers and city managers tools to actively use smell in their work.
The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction estimates that globally from 2000 to 2012 disasters killed 1.2 million people, affected 2.9 billion others, and claimed $1.7 trillion dollars in material damage. The United States has moved into a “new normal” of frequent, billion-dollar hurricanes, eight of the ten costliest occurring since 2004. The Department of Defense warns that climate change threatens national security and will cause global political instability as a result of “prolonged drought and flooding … food shortages, desertification, population dislocation and mass migration, and sea level rise.” Not a week goes by without news of a new technological “accident,” and the malignant long-term impacts of chemicals, radiation, plastics, petroleum—the material markers of technological society—on our bodies, our communities, and our planet.
Historians of technology and science—working together with STS colleagues—have powerful tools to apply toward the work of reducing disaster losses globally in the twenty-first century. Disaster research is in fact a wildly interdisciplinary intellectual ground, comprised of the humanities and social sciences, and converging frequently with more practice-focused communities in city planning, emergency management, public health, public policy, engineering, and the natural and physical sciences. Disasters cut across realms of knowledge and practice in an unparalleled way.
Historians of technology have a very specific role to play in offering longitudinal perspective—charting hazards and risks, technical epistemologies and languages, and disasters themselves across historical time. Historical research is also highly attuned to comparative analysis, discovering and connecting expert and organizational cultures across disciplinary, organizational, and national boundaries. These skills are useful as we try to understand the ways that hazards are created, risks are calculated, and policies of disaster management are enacted. Disasters themselves are scrutinized by historians for the ways they are used to frame and reframe arguments over nature, technology, corporate power, and the role of the modern state in protecting citizens. And, of course, historians of technology are particularly well-poised to open the black box of technology, demonstrating the material and also the political mechanisms of technical knowledge and artifacts. Many from the history of technology community have worked influentially in this area for years. But the need for even more historical understanding is at this time acute. A poverty of disaster memory is convenient for some, but a tragedy for most. And if we do not continue to fill this void of knowledge, others will do it for us without the perspectives offered by the long view of history, namely that risk-taking is no accident and disasters are never truly unexpected.
The relevance of disaster research is clear in the pages of Technology and Culture since September 11, and even more visible in events such as the 2011 co-located (HSS, SHOT, 4S) plenary session on “Dealing with Disasters,” with Gabrielle Hecht, Hugh Gusterson, and Spencer Weart. At the 2012 SHOT annual meeting, the Prometheans Special Interest Group brought together seventeen papers around the topic of “Historical and Contemporary Studies of Disasters.” The 4S meeting that same year included four linked panels dedicated to the topic of Fukushima (among many other disaster-themed sessions). This year, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists of science and technology played a central role in the fiftieth anniversary of the highly influential Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware. And an interdisciplinary Disaster-STS research portal is now live on the web (http://disaster-sts-network.org/). Disaster research is emerging as a vigorous subfield in the larger hybrid of techno-scientific inquiry—overlapping productively with environmental, public health, and industrial history.
If we believe (as I do) that history provides the foregrounding for effective public policy in nuclear regulation, environmental pollution, sustainable land use, climate change, and emergency management, then it is a mistake for us to sit by the phone anticipating a senator’s call asking for advice about the next disaster. Waiting for relevant disaster research to organically “find its way” into public discourse is a failure of professional responsibility, and of imagination. Historians can participate in disaster reduction interventions at levels that promise tremendous impact—through scholarship first, in our roles as educators (most of us teach future technical and...
In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as theeffect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events.
Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.
In the context of an increased attention to issues of participation, legitimacy, transparency and accountability in the field of environmental politics and policy, collaborative governance arrangements have been promoted to rearticulate the interactions between experts, policy-makers and citizens. This article discusses the relationship between the democratization of environmental governance and the democratization of expertise by focusing on two influential frameworks developed in the field of Science and Technology Studies: the framework of post-normal science, as elaborated by Funtowicz and Ravetz, and the notion of co-production developed by Jasanoff. By discussing in details the original formulations of these concepts, and by reviewing works adopting the two frameworks in the fields of climate science and policy, we discuss their potential contribution to the analysis of the politics of science in the context of environmental policy-making. We suggest that dynamics and outputs of the knowledge-making processes play a different role in the two frameworks, which reflects different sensibilities with respect to policy analysis—and in turn allows for a wide and diverse set of analytical opportunities.
Winner of the 1996 Don K. Price Award of the American Political Science Association, as "the best book of the year on science, technology, and politics." This eye-opening book describes how modern technologies--such as computers, automobiles, machine tools, hybrid crops, nuclear reactors, and others--contribute to vexing social problems ranging from the continued subordination of women and workers to widespread political disengagement. Engineers, manufacturers, and policy makers rarely take these consequences into account. Contending that reinvigorated democratic politics can and should supersede conventional economic reasoning as a basis for decisions about technology, Richard Sclove clearly outlines how the general public can become actively involved in all phases of technology decision making, from assessment and policy making to research and development. For half a century, the Cold War provided the rationale for U.S. science and technology policies. The demise of the Cold War, Sclove argues, provides an ideal opportunity to reformulate technology decision making and design, making them more responsive to social needs. Synthesizing recent research into the social dimensions of technology with democratic theory, the author develops an innovative, practical framework for distinguishing technologies that are compatible with true democratic ideals from those that are not. The text abounds in well-researched examples from all over the world and throughout history of societies that have used technology to enhance their way of life without sacrificing their ideals or traditions, as well as those where technology has completely disrupted prior patterns of community life. Drawing valuable lessons from these studies, Sclove offers concrete suggestions for implementing political and institutional strategies that will create a more sustainable, socially responsive, and humane technology.