Data, Science, and Environmental Justice

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Multiple environmental hazards converging in low income and minority communities remain among this nation’s most significant and recalcitrant environmental problems. First highlighted by the Environmental Justice movement in the 1980s and 90s then elaborated as an emerging concept in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and other scientific fields and through community-based civic science, the problem of cumulative exposure has posed special challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the premier environmental regulator in the United States. This project will study how EPA’s science-based and data-based pollution control has contended with and adapted to the growing knowledge of cumulative exposures in Environmental Justice communities. It aims to boost the nation’s collective capacity to achieve greater environmental justice both intellectually, by looking for science-related EPA practices that may require reexamination and reform, and by broadening public awareness. Offering substantial training in graduate and post-graduate education as well as for younger members of two collaborating Environmental Justice groups, its many products of analysis and outreach include three articles, a white paper, a book written for public as well as academic audiences, public databases, workshops, and webinars for EPA staff as well as other policymakers, and new data tools and other capacity-building for Environmental Justice groups and communities. This three-year investigation of the EPA’s forty-year track record of handling the cumulative environmental risks faced by low income and minority communities will study agency contentions with cumulative exposure in three realms: scientific approaches, including civic science; the definition and collection of data; and bureaucratic uses of this science and data in decision making associated with Environmental Justice communities. Drawing on interviews, publications, and archives as well as documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, it will make scholarly contributions to newer STS fields such as critical data studies, undone science/data, and civic science, and more broadly, to understanding of the data-dependence of the federal bureaucracy and the limits to the impact of social movements on it.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.