Doctoral Dissertation Research: Analyzing Health and Environmental Risk in the Ecuadorian Amazon

北卡罗来纳大学博士生阿米莉亚·菲斯克将在玛格丽特·维纳博士的指导下，探索那些审计和调查采掘业对环境和健康影响的人员所使用的类别如何反映他们收集和分析数据的方法所产生的看法。这位研究人员将对厄瓜多尔亚马逊地区东北角的石油生产进行民族志研究，过去40年来，那里一直是密集石油作业的地点。石油开采越来越与环境和健康风险(污染、农业径流、癌症报告、生殖困难等)联系在一起。对于亚马逊这一地区的许多人来说。为了回应与石油相关的担忧，国家、非政府和科学实体聚集在一起，进行了大量调查，试图研究石油生产的后果。这项研究调查了环境和健康风险的概念是如何通过用于确定、衡量和呈现这些风险的工具来发展的。调查人员建议跟踪居民、活动家和教育工作者，特别是他们参与的三种实践：新兴形式的教育旅游；环境监测培训；以及社区测绘项目。专注于这三种截然不同的做法将使调查人员能够引出环境和健康风险是如何在实践中识别、形成和争论的。该项目不仅提供了对各种行为者所理解的对环境有害和对健康不利的重新思考，而且还使调查各种衡量、记录和培训做法的后果成为可能。通过向厄瓜多尔和美国的政策和行业官员传播其成果，该项目有助于提高公众对能源政策和采掘业发展的科学和技术了解。

University of North Carolina doctoral student Amelia Fiske, under the guidance of Dr. Margaret Wiener, will explore how the categories used by those auditing and investigating the environmental and health impacts of extractive industries reflect perceptions that emerge from their methods of data collection and analysis. The researcher will conduct an ethnographic study of oil production in the northeastern corner of the Ecuadorian Amazon, which for the past 40 years has been the site of intensive oil operations. Oil extraction has increasingly become associated with environmental and health risks (pollution, agricultural runoff, reports of cancer, reproductive difficulties, etc.) for many people in this area of the Amazon. In response to the concerns associated with oil, state, non-governmental, and scientific entities have gathered to conduct numerous investigations trying to study the consequences of oil production. This research investigates how notions of environmental and health risks develop through the tools used to ascertain, measure, and present those risks. The investigator proposes to follow residents, activists, and educators as they engage in three kinds of practices in particular: emergent forms of educational tourism; environmental monitoring training; and community mapping projects. Concentrating on these three very different practices will allow the investigator to elicit how environmental and health risks are identified, given shape, and contested in practice.This project offers a rethinking not only of what is understood as environmentally harmful and health adverse by various actors, but also enables an investigation of the consequences of various practices of measurement, documentation, and training. By disseminating its results to policy and industry officials in Ecuador and the United States, the project contributes to enhancing the public's scientific and technological understanding of energy policy and extractive industry development.