Refining Expertise: How Responsible Engineers Subvert Environmental Justice Challenges
Gwen Ottinger
2013年3月 · NYU Press
電子書籍
240
ページ
family_home
利用可能
info
report評価とレビューは確認済みではありません 詳細
この電子書籍について
Winner of the 2015 Rachel Carson Prize presented by the Society for Social Studies of Science
Residents of a small Louisiana town were sure that the oil refinery next door was making them sick. As part of a campaign demanding relocation away from the refinery, they collected scientific data to prove it. Their campaign ended with a settlement agreement that addressed many of their grievances—but not concerns about their health. Yet, instead of continuing to collect data, residents began to let refinery scientists' assertions that their operations did not harm them stand without challenge. What makes a community move so suddenly from actively challenging to apparently accepting experts' authority?
Refining Expertise argues that the answer lies in the way that refinery scientists and engineers defined themselves as experts. Rather than claiming to be infallible, they began to portray themselves as responsible—committed to operating safely and to contributing to the well-being of the community. The volume shows that by grounding their claims to responsibility in influential ideas from the larger culture about what makes good citizens, nice communities, and moral companies, refinery scientists made it much harder for residents to challenge their expertise and thus re-established their authority over scientific questions related to the refinery's health and environmental effects.
Gwen Ottinger here shows how industrial facilities' current approaches to dealing with concerned communities—approaches which leave much room for negotiation while shielding industry's environmental and health claims from
critique—effectively undermine not only individual grassroots campaigns but also environmental justice activism and far-reaching efforts to democratize science. This work drives home the need for both activists and politically engaged scholars to reconfigure their own activities in response, in order to advance community health and robust scientific knowledge about it.
Residents of a small Louisiana town were sure that the oil refinery next door was making them sick. As part of a campaign demanding relocation away from the refinery, they collected scientific data to prove it. Their campaign ended with a settlement agreement that addressed many of their grievances—but not concerns about their health. Yet, instead of continuing to collect data, residents began to let refinery scientists' assertions that their operations did not harm them stand without challenge. What makes a community move so suddenly from actively challenging to apparently accepting experts' authority?
Refining Expertise argues that the answer lies in the way that refinery scientists and engineers defined themselves as experts. Rather than claiming to be infallible, they began to portray themselves as responsible—committed to operating safely and to contributing to the well-being of the community. The volume shows that by grounding their claims to responsibility in influential ideas from the larger culture about what makes good citizens, nice communities, and moral companies, refinery scientists made it much harder for residents to challenge their expertise and thus re-established their authority over scientific questions related to the refinery's health and environmental effects.
Gwen Ottinger here shows how industrial facilities' current approaches to dealing with concerned communities—approaches which leave much room for negotiation while shielding industry's environmental and health claims from
critique—effectively undermine not only individual grassroots campaigns but also environmental justice activism and far-reaching efforts to democratize science. This work drives home the need for both activists and politically engaged scholars to reconfigure their own activities in response, in order to advance community health and robust scientific knowledge about it.
著者について
Gwen Ottinger is Associate Professor of Politics at Drexel University and the Director of the Fair Tech Collective. She is the author of Refining Expertise: How Responsible Engineers Subvert Environmental Justice Challenges (NYU Press, 2013).
この電子書籍を評価する
ご感想をお聞かせください。
読書情報
スマートフォンとタブレット
Android や iPad / iPhone 用の Google Play ブックス アプリをインストールしてください。このアプリがアカウントと自動的に同期するため、どこでもオンラインやオフラインで読むことができます。
ノートパソコンとデスクトップ パソコン
Google Play で購入したオーディブックは、パソコンのウェブブラウザで再生できます。
電子書籍リーダーなどのデバイス
Kobo 電子書籍リーダーなどの E Ink デバイスで読むには、ファイルをダウンロードしてデバイスに転送する必要があります。サポートされている電子書籍リーダーにファイルを転送する方法について詳しくは、ヘルプセンターをご覧ください。
