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Our project has been conducted in so-called ‘Kelowna’ , located in ‘British Columbia’ , ‘Canada’. This land on which we live and work is the unceded, ancestral territory of the syilx Okanagan nation. Prior to European colonisation in the 19th century, the syilx people stewarded the land for thousands of years, guided by an ethos that sees the nonhuman world as an inheritance to be protected rather than owned and exploited. In spite of the violence of settler colonialism, syilx culture endures. A compelling example of the mobilisation of syilx knowledge systems and philosophies against environmental injustice is the restoration of kokanee and coho salmon to the Okanagan. Since the 1990s, the Okanagan Nation Alliance has led efforts to restore habitats, build fish passages over dams, and release fry. The salmon populations have rebounded from near extinction through a process guided by syilx environmental principles. While designing a class in place-based environmental humanities methods we have collaborated with syilx colleagues to integrate their philosophies and approaches to land-based learning. 

Image source 'Mission Creek in Kelowna', Daisy Pullman

Pullman, Daisy, Astrida Niemanis, Natalie Forssman and Haida Gaede. 2023.  "Place-based Learning on syilx Land." 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, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

BIOETHNOGRAPHY: “Thus, instead of combining objects of inquiry (biology and culture), I conceived of bioethnography as combining two different methods for knowing the world (Mol 2002, 153)—ethnographic observation and biochemical sampling—in order to ask and answer research questions that could not be addressed through either method alone. This methodological focus involves exploring how our data collection and analysis might be shaped if we suspended the nature/culture binary” (Roberts, 2021, p. 2)

“bioethnography asks, what if we created numbers otherwise, upending the cooked data that reinforces inequality? In fact, bioethnography can enable us to identify structural forces, such as NAFTA and the global health apparatus itself, that are part of the bodily processes that make ill health. In other words, while we know that all data is cooked, it matters how it’s cooked.” (Roberts, 2021, p. 5)

Roberts describes their ongoing bioethnographic collaboration with a team of exposure scientists who are working in environmental engineering and health. Though ethnography is not easily enumerated, Roberts emphasizes that integrating it with quantitative data is worthwhile and makes for “better numbers”. As an example, Roberts describes 3 bioethnographic projects on neighborhoods, water distribution, and employment and chemical exposures. These projects were part of a longitudinal birth-cohort study in Mexico City called Early Life Exposures in Mexico to ENvironmental Toxicants (ELEMENT), created to understand the effects of early-life nutrition and exposure to toxicants (such as lead and phenols). Overtime, this project was expanded to include the study of new toxins (e.g. BPAS, mercury, and fluoride) and new health concerns (e.g. obesity, meopause, sleep).

Roberts’ focus on neighborhoods was produced from the ethnographic observation that neighborhood characteristics might influence exposure levels. Following this observation, Roberts’ and ELEMENT researchers sorted participants by neighborhood and identified significant differences in blood-lead levels. Additionally, Roberts applied previous ethnographic observation and scholarship to argue that high levels of toxicants like lead correlate with the capacity of neighborhoods to withstand other dangers, such as police violence. These findings prompted the development of two new bioethnographic project centered on water and the effect of neighborhood dynamics on health.