Doctoral Dissertation Research: Remaking Toxicity: Computational Toxicology and Urban Exposure Experiences

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IntroductionThis doctoral dissertation improvement grant will support an ethnographic study that focuses on toxicologists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who are developing new toxicity testing methods and on people living with chronic exposures in a low-income minority community in Phoenix, Arizona. The project will use data collected from participant observation, ethnographic interviewing, and scientific and community documents to identify the ways in which current chemical knowledge practices differ from prior practices and to analyze the socio-political implications of these changes. Intellectual MeritThis project will serve to enhance the literature on co-production and distributed knowledge systems, as well as contemporary debates about the distinction between the environment, the body, the self, and technology. It will provide additional perspectives on how scale is understood in environmental justice contexts by investigating temporal and biological scales of toxicity, thereby complementing the use of spatial scales. It will also improve understandings of exposure experiences in disadvantaged communities where environmental justice activism is not prominent and exposures are complex. By engaging expert and lay notions of toxicity as they evolve, the research findings will be generalizable to broader questions about the relationship between science and public knowledge in an era where the growth and dissemination of knowledge proceeds at an increasingly rapid pace.Broader ImpactsResearch results will contribute to debates about the desirability of various types of knowledge about complex chemical risks. They will help to understand how environmental health and safety should be protected. They will inform interactions between scientific and lay knowledge practices, site remediation, and policy making in the United States. They may also serve to orient toxicologists and regulators to environmental justice issues and to publics who deal most intimately with chemical substances. Results will be disseminated through presentations to each study community and to broader scholarly communities, in a white paper written for the EPA?s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, and through activities developed for an environmental outreach program in the urban field site.