Environmental health issues and pollution are causing growing concern in our contemporary societies, leading or not to protests or collective action. Pollution sources can be highly visible, particularly when linked to infrastructure with a significant environmental impact, such as waste disposal sites, refineries, incinerators, highway interchanges, expressways, airports, waste treatment centers, and industrial areas. In some cases, pollution is much less visible, as in the case of outdoor or indoor air pollution, soil contamination in urban areas, or drinking water contamination linked to pesticide metabolites or PFAS. Although these types of pollution have global effects, they directly affect populations living in the impacted areas. This overexposure of certain areas and certain groups to pollution has been the subject of much debate, highlighting environmental injustice or environmental inequality.

In response to citizen alerts, which are most often raised by local residents’ groups or non-governmental organizations promoting environmental justice, health agencies regularly (but not systematically) investigate this potential overexposure as part of their regulatory monitoring process. However, due to the type of questions asked and the scientific protocols used, these investigations often yield inconclusive results. They often suggest that threshold levels are not reached, which can indirectly legitimize the inaction of public authorities (Allen et al. 2017, Barbier 2019, Henry 2017, Henry 2021). This does not mean that environmental damage is non-existent in these areas, but rather that the questions asked, the scientific protocols used, or the available data have not made it possible to objectively assess environmental risks scientifically (Hess, 2016). In these situations, moreover, local communities, in most cases, have not been involved in the process of producing this scientific knowledge (Allen et al. 2017, Kuchinskaya 2019). This results in a gap between official knowledge and the experiential knowledge developed by these groups who “live with” pollution, leading to a loss of trust in experts, elected officials, and the administration (Gramaglia 2023).

More recently, this gap between official knowledge and the “experiential knowledge” of fenceline communities (Gramaglia 2023, Akrich and Rabeharisoa, n.d.) has led to the rise of numerous citizen science and participatory science projects, such as toxic tours – offered by organizations promoting environmental justice, or by local residents’ groups – pollution monitoring using digital microsensors, ‘bucket’ air samplers and toxic soup indexes. These various initiatives are characterized by forms of “epistemic innovation” (Ottinger 2023). Epistemic innovation shows how impacted residents devise alternative scientific concepts and categories to counter official expertise, and engage in new forms of knowledge production. The creation of the Institut Ecocitoyen pour la Connaissance des Pollutions in Fos-sur-Mer, France, is indicative of how citizen mobilization seeks the promotion of new forms and protocols of scientific knowledge. Drawing from sociology, anthropology and history, this symposium will examine the different forms of participatory and citizen knowledge produced in these territories, as well as their effects on the work of agencies, state administration, and the actions of public authorities. Is there a specificity to citizen science depending on the types of environmental pollution studied? To what extent do these new forms of expertise reframe what “science” is in the already well-established institutional system of expertise production? What are the effects of citizen science on public action?

This symposium also aims to study the internal structuration of these participatory and citizen projects in terms of public participation, and to analyze any potential difficulties in fostering wide participation accross all fractions of the population. Significant differences in terms of the allocation of economic, cultural, and educational capital, as well as biographical availability, can structure residents’ abilities to speak out and to participate in these initiatives. These forms of biographical availability or unavailability often correlate with the socio-economic positions of local residents and workers in the territories, but also with variables such as age, gender, and race. System avoidance (Brayne, 2014) can be identified, particularly among vulnerable groups, socially marginalized and/or temporarily present in the damaged territory, who exclude themselves from movements because they do not feel that their voices can be heard by political decision-makers and industrial groups, or that their experiences, on their own scale, can be valuable in the context of larger mobilizations. Furthermore, the organizers of these initiatives often come from the academic world and thus become the main relays of opinion on these issues, working as intermediaries with the press to publicize the health disasters that have occurred. Social and spatial distance between scientists and the general public, but also between administrators, policymakers, and the general public (Murphy, 2004), should not be overlooked in the production of forms of ignorance and silencing affecting these territories.

Other challenges may arise in the process of setting up, pursuing, and then publicizing the results of these participatory science projects. One example is terminology issues, which are not always resolved by consensus among the various stakeholders involved in these initiatives. The use of terms from the social sciences referring to the lexicon of “environmental violence” and “slow violence” (Nixon, 2013; Davies, 2022; Le Naour and Bécot, 2023), “environmental suffering” (Auyero and Swistun, 2009), or “toxicity” to refer to health risks, can provoke strong criticism, including from researchers and residents who do not identify with these terms for several reasons: fear of polarization, legal implications and the logic of responsibility induced by the use of these terms, concerns about “scientific” neutrality, industrial and political interests to be taken into account, categories of analysis that frame all of the life experiences of residents solely through the prism of health risk, etc. This symposium will also provide an opportunity to revisit these terminological tensions and their various implications.

References:

Akrich, Madelaine et Rabeharisoa, Vololona. 2012. « L'expertise profane dans les associations de patients, un outil de démocratie sanitaire ». Santé Publique, 24 (1) : 69-74. https://doi.org/10.3917/spub.121.0069.  

Allen, Barbara, Yolaine Ferrier et Alison Cohen. 2017. « Through a maze of studies: health questions and ‘undone science’ in a French industrial region ». Environmental Sociology 3 (2): 134‑44. https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2016.1220850.

Auyero Javier et Debora Alejandra Swistun. 2009. Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown. Oxford, New York : Oxford University Press.

Barbier, Laura. 2019. Une entreprise inaccessible ? Faire la preuve des pathologies environnementales par l’épidémiologie : l’exemple du nucléaire en Grande-Bretagne et en France. Thèse de doctorat, Université de Paris.  

Brayne, Sarah. 2014. « Surveillance and System Avoidance: Criminal Justice Contact and Institutional Attachment ». American Sociological Review, 79 (3) : 367-391. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122414530398. 

Davies, Thom. 2022. « Slow Violence and Toxic Geographies: ‘Out of Sight’ to Whom? » Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 40 (2) : 409-427.https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654419841063.

Gramaglia, Christelle. 2023. Habiter la pollution industrielle. Expériences et métrologies citoyennes de la contamination. Paris : Presses des Mines.

Hess, David J. 2016. Undone Science: Social Movements, Mobilized Publics, and Industrial Transitions. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London : The MIT Press.

Henry, Emmanuel. 2017. Ignorance scientifique et inaction publique. Les politiques de santé au travail. Paris : Les Presses de Science Po. 

Henry, Emmanuel. 2021. La fabrique des non-problème - ou comment éviter que la politique s’en mêle. Paris : Les Presses de SciencesPo.

Kuchinskaya, Olga. 2019. « Citizen Science and the Politics of Environmental Data ». Science, Technology, & Human Values, 44(5), 871-880. https://doi-org.proxy.bu.dauphine.fr/10.1177/0162243919858669. 

Bécot, Renaud et Gwénola Le Naour (dir.). 2023. Vivre et lutter dans un monde toxique : violence environnementale et santé à l'âge du pétrole, pp. 49-86. Paris : Le Seuil.

Murphy, Michelle. 2004. « Uncertain Exposures and the Privilege of Imperception: Activist Scientists and Race at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ». Osiris, 19 (2) : 266-282. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3655244. 

Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London : Harvard University Press.

Ottinger, Gwen. 2023. « Ouverture. L’inventivité épistémique et les dilemmes de la protestation ». Dans Vivre et lutter dans un monde toxique : violence environnementale et santé à l'âge du pétrole, Renaud Bécot et Gwénola Le Naour (dir.), pp. 49-86. Paris : Le Seuil. 

Organizing committee:

Élodie Edwards-Grossi, IRISSO, Université Paris Dauphine - PSL.

Emmanuel Henry, IRISSO, Université Paris Dauphine - PSL, CNRS.

Justyna Moizard-Lanvin, IRISSO, Université Paris Dauphine - PSL.