Capturing Invisible LAB

Thursday! 18:00!

Społeczeństwo jest EKSPERTEM/EKSPERTKĄ!

Zapraszamy wszystkich na kolejne seminarium Capturing Invisible LAB, tym razem gościć będziemy Ember McCoy z Uniwersytetu w Michigan, która opowie nam o tym jak rozumiane jest bezpieczeństwo w politykach dotyczących czystości powietrza w USA!
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Ember D. McCoy is a fifth year Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability specializing in Environmental Justice and Science and Technology Public Policy. She is an interdisciplinary scholar, examining environmental racism through the prism of Science, Technology, and Society, feminist geography, and political ecology. Her dissertation employs a case study of Southwest Detroit to investigate laypersons’ non-technical ways of knowing environmental harm and their incommensurability with environmental policymaking in the United States. By focusing on these dimensions, her goal is to produce fundamental knowledge on how (techno)environmental solutions can embody a more just and liberatory praxis.

Title:

“The People are the Experts”: Disrupting scientific and technical ways of knowing ‘safety’ in U.S. air pollution regulation and monitoring.



Abstract

From AIDS and breast cancer patients to environmental citizen-scientists, lay publics have long formed social movements to challenge state authority around science and technology policymaking. In doing so, they adopt varying strategies to navigate the ‘expertise barrier:’ “the formal and informal rules” that make it hard for those “without technical expertise to engage as equals” with scientific elite (Parthasarathy, 2020, p. 355). Science, Technology, and Society (STS) scholars have thoroughly documented the ways in which activists’ groups have successfully garnered proof and/or legitimacy to pe*****te this barrier. However, I argue that many of these strategies are not just attempts to influence science, but are, in fact, attempts to disrupt techno-environmental epistemologies altogether. Using the case study of environmental justice (EJ) activism in Southwest Detroit, I articulate the ways in which activists intentionally “destabilize and undo” (Latour, 1983) technoscientific ways of knowing environmental exposure. In doing so, I detail two strategies: a white cross campaign and toxic tours. While these strategies are often thought of only in terms of political performance, I argue that they are engaging in important epistemological disruption, and that, as STS scholars, we need to interpret them as such to seriously engage and analyze the politics of knowledge in science and technology policymaking.

Instytut Socjologii UJ Filozoficzny Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego Capturing Invisible LAB