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

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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.