Our Environment, Ourselves: Multiple Knowledges and Contested Science in the Environmental Health Arena

该奖项支持在有争议的环境健康竞技场中的知识生产和索赔实践研究。环境健康被广泛认为是我们这个时代最紧迫的问题之一，也是公众和政策制定者经常寻求科学答案的问题之一。但是，由于环境污染和退化对人类健康的影响很难衡量，科学界和公共卫生界对如何确定因果关系存在争议。基层环境和健康活动家团体的观点和目标往往与科学家的观点和目标非常不同，活动家团体甚至可能在他们认为生态系统健康和社区健康联系在一起的程度上彼此不同。政策制定者和化学、农业和有毒废物行业的利益和目标使情况进一步复杂化。该奖项允许调查人员开始探索与美国环境健康相关的各种各样的，往往相互矛盾的含义。调查人员将在两个地点进行实地工作，这些问题正在辩论中。 这些案例在重要方面有所不同，因此她可以将它们的特征与文献中关于此类争议的特征进行比较，制定初步假设，思考如何最好地进行比较，并开发一个元框架来思考这些冲突的轨迹。这项研究的目的是增进对环境科学的社会背景和影响的了解，并为公众关于环境健康的辩论提供信息。拟议的项目侧重于不同行为者在环境健康竞技场中创造的知识种类，知识产生和使用的背景和方式，以及多种知识之间的关系。

This award supports research on knowledge production and claimsmaking-practices in the contested environmental health arena. Environmental health is widely viewed as one-of the most urgent problems of our time, and it is one in which the public and policymakers often look to science for answers. But because the impact of environmental pollution and degradation on-human health is very difficult to measure, there is controversy within the scientific and public-health communities about how to determine cause and effect. The perspectives and goals of-grassroots environmental and health activist groups often are very different from those of -scientists, and activist groups may diverge even from each other in the degree to which they-perceive ecosystem health and community health to be linked. The interests and goals of-policymakers and of the chemical, agricultural, and toxic waste industries further complicate the-picture.-This award allows the investigator to begin to explore the diverse, often contradictory meanings associated with-environmental health in the U.S. The investigator will conduct field work at two sites in which these issues are under debate. The cases have been selected to differ in important ways, so that she can compare their characteristics with those found in the literature on such controversies, formulate tentative hypotheses, think about how comparisons can best be made, and develop a meta-framework for thinking about the trajectories of these conflicts. The study is being conducted with the interrelated goals of advancing-knowledge about the social contexts and implications of environmental science and also informing-public debate about environmental health. The proposed project focuses on the kinds of knowledge created by different actors-in the environmental health arena, the contexts and ways in which that knowledge is produced and-used, and the relationship between and among multiple knowledges.-