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

北卡罗来纳州大学博士生阿米莉亚·菲斯克在玛格丽特·维纳博士的指导下，将探讨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的数据收集和分析方法所产生的看法。研究人员将对厄瓜多尔亚马逊东北角的石油生产进行人种学研究，该地区在过去40年中一直是密集的石油作业地点。石油开采日益与环境和健康风险（污染、农业径流、癌症报告、生殖困难等）联系在一起。对于亚马逊地区的许多人来说。为了应对与石油相关的问题，国家、非政府和科学实体聚集在一起进行了大量的调查，试图研究石油生产的后果。本研究探讨了环境和健康风险的概念如何通过用于确定，测量和呈现这些风险的工具来发展。调查人员建议遵循居民，活动家和教育工作者，因为他们特别从事三种实践：教育旅游的新兴形式;环境监测培训;和社区绘图项目。集中在这三个非常不同的做法将使调查人员得出如何识别环境和健康风险，给予形状，并在practices.This项目提供了一个重新思考，不仅是什么被理解为环境有害和健康不利的各种行为者，但也使调查的后果，各种做法的测量，文件和培训。通过向厄瓜多尔和美国的政策和工业官员传播其成果，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认识。

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.