Analyze

Labor of confusion: “During the long period of slowly germinating contamination, the actions of government authorities toward pollution in the neighborhood were less consistent and more contradictory than either the denial or underestimation that has been documented in the existing literature. Those multiple incongruous actions gave shape to what we term, extending the insights of students of ideology and symbolic power (Thompson 1984; Eagleton 1991; Bourdieu 1991), a labor of confusion that has a decisive effect on shared (mis)understandings.” (10)

 Ulrich Beck, social invisibility, lack of “social thinking” about environmental issues (Beck 1992)

Bourdieu, symbolic violence - misrecognition of power structures on part of the oppressed enables domination

Toxic uncertainty: “a way of experiencing toxic suffering that is shaped by what we call, borrowing from Charles Tilly (1996), the interacting “invisible elbows” of external power forces and of everyday routine survival struggles” (6)

Katsi Cook, Mother’s Milk Project, collecting samples of breast milk: “Katsi has described this work as “barefoot epidemiology,” with Indigenous women developing their own research projects based on community concerns and then collecting their own data.” (90) - 61? – used a private lab to analyze samples because women did not trust the New York State Health Department

“Barefoot epidemiology” is a concept borrowed from China’s “barefoot doctors”—community-level health workers who brought basic care to China’s countryside in the mid-twentieth century. Hipgrave, “Communicable Disease Control.” According to a “workers’ manual” published by the International Labour Organization, barefoot research is often qualitative, and qualitative research is not the standard approach for conducting health studies, which tend to be based on laboratory experiments and clinical findings. See Keith et al., Barefoot Research” (294)

Civic Dislocation: “In many instances Mohawks experienced what Sheila Jasanoff calls “civic dislocation,” which she defines as a mismatch between what governmental institutions were supposed to do for the public, and what they did in reality. In the dislocated state, trust in government vanished and people looked to other institutions . . . for information and advice to restore their security. It was as if the gears of democracy had spun loose, causing citizens, at least temporarily, to disengage from the state” (118) 

“Dennis Wiedman describes these negative sociocultural changes and structures of disempowerment as “chronicities of modernity,” which produce everyday behaviors that limit physical activities while promoting high caloric intake and psychosocial stress” (235)

Third space of sovereignty: “This tension that arises when community members challenge political bodies while simultaneously demanding that they address the issues of the community has been theorized by political scientist Kevin Bruyneel, who describes how for centuries Indigenous political actors have demanded rights and resources from the American settler state while also challenging the imposition of colonial rule on their lives. He calls this resistance a “third space of sovereignty” that resides neither inside nor outside the American political system, but exists on the very boundaries of that system.” (259)

Katsi Cook, Mother’s Milk Project, collecting samples of breast milk: “Katsi has described this work as “barefoot epidemiology,” with Indigenous women developing their own research projects based on community concerns and then collecting their own data.” (90) - 61? – used a private lab to analyze samples because women did not trust the New York State Health Department

“Barefoot epidemiology” is a concept borrowed from China’s “barefoot doctors”—community-level health workers who brought basic care to China’s countryside in the mid-twentieth century. Hipgrave, “Communicable Disease Control.” According to a “workers’ manual” published by the International Labour Organization, barefoot research is often qualitative, and qualitative research is not the standard approach for conducting health studies, which tend to be based on laboratory experiments and clinical findings. See Keith et al., Barefoot Research” (294)

Civic Dislocation: “In many instances Mohawks experienced what Sheila Jasanoff calls “civic dislocation,” which she defines as a mismatch between what governmental institutions were supposed to do for the public, and what they did in reality. In the dislocated state, trust in government vanished and people looked to other institutions . . . for information and advice to restore their security. It was as if the gears of democracy had spun loose, causing citizens, at least temporarily, to disengage from the state” (118) 

“Dennis Wiedman describes these negative sociocultural changes and structures of disempowerment as “chronicities of modernity,” which produce everyday behaviors that limit physical activities while promoting high caloric intake and psychosocial stress” (235)

Third space of sovereignty: “This tension that arises when community members challenge political bodies while simultaneously demanding that they address the issues of the community has been theorized by political scientist Kevin Bruyneel, who describes how for centuries Indigenous political actors have demanded rights and resources from the American settler state while also challenging the imposition of colonial rule on their lives. He calls this resistance a “third space of sovereignty” that resides neither inside nor outside the American political system, but exists on the very boundaries of that system.” (259)

This book builds on environmental justice research and concepts. In a reflection over the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy, Kim Fortun (2012) proposed the beginning of a “late industrialism” era where disasters would be normalized as a result of conflicting information from the media and “experts” making it impossible for individuals to make informed decisions on politics and to demand environmental regulation. Bullard and Wright (2009) and Pellow (2018) proposed ethnic minorities and groups from lower socio-economic status are disproportionately burdened by toxic pollution; polluted communities face an uphill environmental justice battle against powerful corporations and local politicians to prove this disproportional toxic exposure. Brown (1993) and Allen (2003) proposed “popular epidemiology,” where communities would upkeep with their own health research, as an important way to include the community in research that would benefit them; with the benefit of having multiple different perspectives addressing one issue. Citizen science, coined by Alan Irwin (1995) is a popular concept that enforces community-based participatory research. Pellow (2018) proposed “critical environmental justices,'' defining it in four pillars: (1) “intersectional forms of inequality and oppression,” (2) “the role of scale in the production and possible resolution of environmental injustices,” (3) “recognition that social inequalities are deeply embedded in state power,” (4) “indispensability, arguing that “excluded, marginalized, and othered populations, beings, and things ... must not be viewed as expendable but rather as indispensable to our collective futures'' (Pellow 2018, 26).

Thom and Mah (2022) build on the importance of community inclusion in research. Although there are scholars interested in coming up with solutions on social-environmental problems. The community rarely benefits from the results of that research because there’s a huge disconnect between academia and neighborhoods with limited resources. Often, individuals of lower socio-economic status are left uninformed and underrepresented, even in cases of research. This book uses case studies of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research to show different ways to understand environmental injustice, political strategies, and ways to expand citizen science engagement and environmental literacy around the world. 

Lee references work from two main sources: Jill Lindsey Harrison’s book, From the Inside Out: The Fight for Environmental Justice Within Government Agencies, and Ana Baptista’s Ph.D. dissertation, “Just Policies? A Multiple Case Study of State Environmental Justice Policies.” Harrison describes how EJ managers and staff undermine environmental issues resisting EJ integration. She argues this resistance is based on: “environmental protection is colorblind, bettering the environment overall means that the environment is improved for everyone, EPA is a science agency while EJ deals with social issues, and other “standard narratives” rooted generally in American normative societal values or in long-held premises that have shaped the environmental protection field for decades” (Lee, 2021). Baptista’s concept suggest EJ practice’s inactivity contributes to procedural injustice while also highlighting the importance of structural justice when dealing with environmental injustice as it is deeply rooted in racial discrimination and the perpetuating of racism through the skewed relationship between governmental entities and black communities. 

In addition to these references, Lee also highlights contributions from Rebert Bullard, who developed a public health model of prevention that focuses on community-outreach practices to address disproportionate impact. Ryan Holifield, who accentuated the difficulty for government agencies to define “disproportionate impacts” presenting another challenge in legally reinforcing the order. David Pellow, who highlighted the importance of critically looking at race and understanding how attributed meaning to concepts dealing with race change over time. 

In order to advance these referenced works, Lee argues that the best way to integrate earlier findings is by building the capacity of the EJ practitioner “to deploy the core theories that guide EJ practice.” In this instance, the ability to define and  contextualize the term “disproportionate impacts” is a crucial tool to ensure the Executive order becomes operational.       

Distributive justice, Procedural justice, Process justice, Restorative justice, Capabilities approach to justice, Engaged scholarship, Civically-engaged scholarship and learning, Civic expert, Outreach expert, Multidisciplinary expert, Meta-expert, Translational Research, Community-Based Participatory Action Research

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Disproportionate impacts, cumulative impacts, symbolic politics, structural justice, recognitional justice, syndemics, social determinants of health, redlining 

TS: According to Kirsch, an important strategy of a politics of time is centred around distributing information to affected communities. In his words, this includes "accelaration of the learning curve of communities facing the prospect of a new mining project" (2014, 192). He provides terms to characterize different approaches, as well as their shortcomings:

"NGOs have employed a variety of means to reduce the disparity in access to information between mining companies and local communities. The most common strategy for achieving this goal is the vertical transfer of information from metropolitan NGOs to rural communities by sharing materials about comparable mining projects or the track record of the relevant mining company. NGOs also facilitate horizontal information sharing between communities facing similar challenges (Appadurai 2002); this may involve sponsoring visits by local leaders or community representatives to comparable mining sites or attendance at conferences where they can learn about the experiences of other communities affected by mining. [...] NGOs also exploit new opportunities provided by the Internet to share information with people from communities affected by mining, although these efforts are constrained by both the problems of translation and the persistence of the digital divide. Nevertheless, NGO reports are generally more accessible to the public than academic publications, the digital forms of which are ordinarily locked behind expensive paywalls. And the information gap is shrinking as a result of increased attention to mining conflicts by traditional news media, as well as by new social media, including electronic mailing lists, websites, and online video." (Kirsch 2014, 193).