Analyze

Residents of Love Canal, in the Niagara Falls region of Western New York, were alerted to signs of a toxic waste crisis involving the lethal chemical byproduct dioxin in the late 1970s. Residents learned about the crisis through news media, community activism and research, and their own visceral experiences – they could smell noxious fumes, noticed black sludge seeping into their basements, and saw children falling ill. Activists and academics carried out community-based research to survey the area in an effort to understand the extent of the hazard and its effects – data that they saw as missing, at the time – in turn generating evidence of changes in health and pregnancy abnormalities. In doing so, members of the community aimed to hold corporate and government stakeholders accountable to evacuate residents, organize remediation, and strengthen scientific studies and interventions to care for residents. Regional health authorities, however, dismissed community-based studies as “useless housewife data”. Activists responded by scrutinizing government and scientific studies, critiquing a lack of ecological validity and trustworthiness. Residents and community groups’ advocacy contributed to their exercise of epistemic authority, the creation of archival records and initiatives tracking the crisis over the last five decades, and wider public attention to Love Canal and other sites like it.

Image Description and Source: "Map showing distribution of symptoms believed to be caused by Love Canal pollutants," Digital Collections - University at Buffalo Libraries, May 1982.

Shankar, Saguna. 2023. "What's the Use of Data? Epistemic Authority and Environmental Injustice at Love Canal." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali. Kim Fortun, Phillio Baum and Prerna Srigyvan. Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawaiti, Nov 8-11.

This text builds from earlier conceptions of the term “land dispossession” and “land grab”. As defined by the 2011 International Land Coalition, land grabbing specifically refers to large scale land acquisitions that are “ in violation of human rights, without prior consent of the preexisting land users, and with no consideration of social and environmental impacts”. Characterization of land grabs and their resulting harms most commonly considers the effect of physical displacement and harms within the articulated “grabbed” area (Nyantakyi-Frimpong, 2017;Ogwand, 2018;  huaserman, 2018). Li and Pan seek to expand the frame of analysis for land grabs beyond the site of grabbed land to consider the full extent of harms associated with land grabs both geographically (via pollution spillover to areas outside of “grabbed land”) and temporally (via latent “expulsion by pollution). 

 “While the villagers are not passive victims and have adopted various resistance strategies, the space for them to struggle and achieve success is confined and shaped by the existing power asymmetry in which local villagers, capital and local government are embedded.”  (Li and Pan, 2021, p 418). 

“...this framing of land dispossession is problematic in two aspects. Firstly, it obscures an invisible form of land dispossession in which people still maintain control of their land but its use value is damaged by pollution. This kind of indirect land dispossession could lead to expulsion, not due to the direct loss of control over land but by it being rendered useless by pollution.” Li and Pan, 2021, p 409). 

 This text employs a case study approach to characterize how villagers in a village in China have been displaced “in-place” as a result of new industrial activities within the area  (all specific details have been hidden within the publication, wherein the names of villager groups and the site of study itself is referenced only by coded letters). The scale of analysis primarily centers at the village level, though analysis of the case study itself extends towards the country level specifically when analysis of state actors are involved. 

Authors Hua Li and Lu Pan are scholars from China. Li is  affiliated with the College of Humanities and Law at Taiyuan University of Technology, wherein her research focuses specifically on water politics, environmental justice, and rural development and agrarian change. Pan is affiliated with the College of Humanities and Development at China Agricultural University. Her research interests include marginalized communities, rural development, and agrarian change.

Writing against the ecology/infrastructure divide. Nature becomes infrastructure "through work" - technopolitics & environmental politics become inextricably intertwined. Marxist framework, environment as being modified through human labor.