Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Influence of Protracted Exposure to Risk and Risk Management on Local Assessment

本项目调查过去长期风险的经验影响地方评估和政策制定的条件。无论是在科学领域还是在社会和政治生活中，风险都是一个日益重要的主题，最典型的是用来描述未来的方向，即对人类干预开放的东西。大多数风险评估分析依赖于风险作为单一事件经历的背景数据，从中评估一系列成本和收益。这个项目训练一名研究生如何进行严格的以经验为基础的科学实地考察，它询问在风险管理的悠久历史背景下，对风险评估的理解是如何变化的。本案例研究的结果将进一步促进公众对风险分布及其对公共健康的影响的理解，促进有关环境法规的政策讨论，以及巴尔的摩正在进行的教育工作（研究人员将让学生参与研究过程，并向当地档案提供研究材料）。乔治华盛顿大学的研究生Chloe Ahmann（在Joel Kuipers博士的指导下）将研究巴尔的摩市的一个社区，那里的居民正在讨论建造一个垃圾焚烧炉，以便了解，首先，过去接触毒素如何影响个人的风险体验，其次，这种体验如何激励集体动员。自19世纪以来，南巴尔的摩市一直是风险管理的场所，从在移民“大浪潮”期间隔离麻风病人，到利用其冷战时期的化学储备支持核威慑。这些行动对土地和当地健康都留下了重大的印记。如今，该地区已规划成为美国最大的焚化炉所在地。虽然政治代表们支持该项目，认为这是实现能源独立道路上的“可接受风险”，但居民们的回应是援引他们历史上面临的风险。为了了解历史和毒理学动机，研究人员将进行档案和民族志研究，通过(1)追踪影响南巴尔的摩的风险管理历史并询问其累积效应；(2)探索居民如何利用这段历史在当前做出政治主张。在此过程中，她的项目不仅有助于环境正义运动的研究，而且还将增加对历史如何更普遍地影响风险经历（例如，在健康，安全和金融方面）的理解。该项目将依靠基于行动者网络理论和新社会运动的方法框架，并利用传统的民族志数据收集和分析方法，包括在贝布鲁克社区内的参与性观察、口述历史和半结构化访谈。

This project investigates the conditions under which past experiences of protracted risk influence local assessments and policy formulation. Risk is a theme of growing importance both for the sciences and within social and political life, most typically used to describe an orientation toward the future as something open to human intervention. Most risk assessment analyses rely on data from contexts where risk is experienced as a single event from which a set of costs and benefits are to be assessed. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, asks how understandings of risk assessment vary in contexts with a long history of risk management. Findings from this case study will further contribute to public understandings of risk distribution and its implications for public health, policy discussions regarding environmental regulation, and ongoing educational efforts in Baltimore (where the researcher will involve students in the research process and contribute research materials to local archives).George Washington University graduate student Chloe Ahmann (under the direction of Dr. Joel Kuipers) will study one Baltimore City community where residents are debating the construction of a trash-burning incinerator in order to understand, first, how past exposure to toxins affects individuals' experience of risk and, second, how such experience can motivate collective mobilization. South Baltimore City has been a site of risk management since the 19th century, from quarantining lepers during the "great wave" of immigration to supporting nuclear deterrence with its Cold War chemical holdings. These operations have left significant marks on both land and local health. Today, the region is the planned site of the nation's largest incinerator. While political representatives have supported the project as an "acceptable risk" on the path toward energy independence, residents have responded by invoking their historical exposure to risk. In order to understand the historical and toxicological motivations for this, the researcher will conduct both archival and ethnographic research, by (1) tracing histories of risk management that have affected south Baltimore and interrogating their cumulative effects and (2) exploring how residents use this history to make political claims in the present. In doing so, her project will not only contribute to research on environmental justice movements, but will also increase understandings of how history influences experiences of risk more generally (for example, in health, security, and finance). The project will rely on methodological frameworks grounded in actor network theory and new social movement, and make use of conventional methods of ethnographic data collection and analysis, including participant observation within the Baybrook community, oral history, and semi-structured interviews.