Analyze

In this poster, we share preliminary reflections on the ways in which hermeneutic injustice emerges and operates within educational settings and interactions. Hermeneutic injustice is a type of epistemic injustice that occurs when someone’s experiences are not well understood by themselves or by others, either due to unavailability of known concepts or due to systemic barriers that produce non-knowing (Fricker 2007). In 2021, we entered into a collaborative project to design a high school curriculum on environmental injustice and climate change for California’s K-12 students. Although the project convenors aspired to support the diversity of California’s K-12 student population through representational inclusivity across the program participant, they reproduced essentialized notions of what it means to be an “included subject”. In our first inperson meetings, activities intended to invite difference in the curriculum writing and design community were encountered by participants as an opportunity to point to the margins of that community. Who was in the room and who was not? Initial counts excluded some writers whose identity was not readily apparent by race, ethnicity, or age. Some individuals who, to their consternation, were assumed to be white, revealed themselves as people of color. The project chose the “storyline model” of curriculum design to bring coherence across the teams. The model was developed by science educators to promote student agency and active learning. Lessons start with an anchoring phenomenon, which should hook students and produce enough questions to sustain inquiry cycles that culminate in consensus making. As a result, each grade-level unit of our curriculum was intended to focus on a single environmental phenomenon, like wildfire. However, informed by Gregory Bateson’s theory of learning, we sought to foreground complexity by recursively analyzing environmental injustice through case study analysis of many hazards, injustices, and places. It took multiple meetings over several months to arrive at an articulation of environmental injustice as our central phenomenon that recognizes the compounding impacts of both climate change and toxic pollution. It also required restructuring the working relationships between the project's administrative arm, the curriculum consultants, and the writing team. The image we include is a photograph of an exercise done together with another HS team as we were tasked to clarify the aims and goals of our imagined lessons. As is evidenced in the photograph, each writing team found it difficult to articulate learning outcomes as a series of checklists, or goals, separate from skill-development that represented the dynamic need for curriculum capable of examining climate change and the environmental justice needs for California’s students.

Tebbe, Margaret, Tanio, Nadine, and Srigyan, Prerna. 2023.  "Reflections on Hermeneutical Injustice in K-12 Curriculum Development." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawaii, Nov 8-11.

Facing a pivotal federal investigation into Louisiana’s relationship with petro-chemical companies, the state’s attorney general hired lawyers who were simultaneously representing one of the main corporations at the center of the investigation, documents reveal.

The revelations, contained in documents released under public records requests, have led to allegations of a major conflict of interest and come just weeks after the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] dropped its civil rights investigation.

Internal emails, contracts and payments, show that the office of the attorney general, Jeff Landry, hired two lawyers to enter closed-door negotiations with the EPA during the 14-month civil rights investigation. But John King and Tim Hardy were also representing the Taiwanese chemicals firm Formosa in separate litigation, challenging a decision to revoke the company’s state air permits. (Moran and Sneath 2023).

In the 1980s, Formosa Plastics Corporation purchased financially struggling petrochemical plants in Delaware, Texas, and Louisiana. The company subsequently shifted its operations to Texas and Louisiana, where a competitive bidding process ensued between the two states, both of which were known for industry-friendly policies (Tubilewicz 2021). As political scientist Tubilewicz (2021, 16) has argued, the politics surrounding Formosa's investments in these states were not purely motivated by profit but were also shaped by the ongoing struggles of sub-state actors such as politicians and NGOs over issues of internationalization and representation in global affairs.

An example of this can be seen in Formosa's attempt to build a rayon fiber plant in Louisiana's St. John Parish in the late 1990s, an area also known as "Cancer Alley." Protests broke out due to concerns about massive tax exemptions, displacement of Black residents, and the plant's location on the historic Whitney Plantation (Tubilewicz 2021, 11). However, the project was eventually abandoned due to declining market demand and delays. In addition, the local St. John Governor was indicted for illegal industrial rezoning of land around the plantation and receiving $200,000 in real estate commission (Tubilewicz 2021, 11).