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

IntroductionThis博士论文改进补助金将支持一项人种学研究，重点是美国环境保护局的毒理学家，他们正在开发新的毒性测试方法，以及亚利桑那州凤凰城低收入少数民族社区中长期暴露的人。该项目将使用从参与者观察、人种学访谈以及科学和社区文件中收集的数据，以确定当前化学知识实践与先前实践不同的方式，并分析这些变化的社会政治影响。智力优点这个项目将有助于提高合作生产和分布式知识系统的文献，以及对环境，身体，自我和技术之间的区别当代辩论。它将通过调查毒性的时间和生物尺度，从而补充空间尺度的使用，提供有关如何在环境正义背景下理解尺度的更多观点。它还将提高对环境正义活动不突出和暴露复杂的弱势社区的暴露经验的理解。在知识增长和传播速度越来越快的时代，通过让专家和外行对毒性的概念不断发展，研究结果将可推广到关于科学与公众知识之间关系的更广泛问题。它们将有助于了解应如何保护环境健康和安全。他们将告知科学和外行知识实践，现场修复和美国政策制定之间的相互作用。它们还可以帮助毒理学家和监管机构解决环境正义问题，并向与化学物质打交道最密切的公众提供指导。研究结果将通过向每个研究团体和更广泛的学术团体发表演讲的方式传播，并以白色文件的形式为美国环保署撰写。的国家环境正义咨询理事会，并通过在城市实地开展的环境外展计划的活动。

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.